An introduction to John Keats's life and poetry journey

2. John Keats (1795-1821)

3. Negative Capability
“... several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at
once it struck me what quality went to form a Man
of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which
Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean
Negative Capability, that is, when a man is
capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries,
doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and
reason- ... with a great poet the sense of Beauty
overcomes every other consideration, or rather
obliterates all consideration. " Letter to George and
Tom Keats, 1817

4. Negative Capability
"Now it is more noble to sit like Jove than to
fly like Mercury - let us not therefore go
hurrying about and collecting honey-bee
like, buzzing here and there impatiently from
a knowledge of what is to be arrived at: but
let us open our leaves like a flower and be
passive and receptive . . . I was led into
these thoughts, my dear Reynolds, by the
beauty of the morning operating on a sense
of Idleness." Letter to J. H. Reynolds, 1818

5. Nathan Starr, “Negative Capability
in Keats’s Diction”
To Keats (negative capability) came to be
interpreted not as an injunction to content
oneself merely with objectivity, in the literal
sense – a condition not only too restrictive but
virtually impossible for a man of Keats’s
temperament. It meant rather a great expansion
of experience, an identification with the wide
area envisage by Shakespeare, and a
determination to see the individual in its proper
relation to this vast field, so that personal
difficulties could be subordinated.

6. That this inevitably meant some surrender on the part of
the individual goes without saying, but that was not the
first consideration. This creed emphasized Keats’s
concern with particulars outside himself, which inevitably
caused a kind of tug-of-war between his inner and the
outer world. His passion for the phenomena of
experience, his extraordinary perception of sensuous
delights, led him to a kind of universal kinship not only
with all beauty, but even with the vividly active elements
in experience. This resulted in an empathy quite
extraordinary, of a degree and intensity scarcely ever
equalled by an English poet...he says “I feel more and
more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do
not live in this world alone but in a thousands worlds.”

7. He fount it impossible to be a negatively
capable poet completely, to be a spectator
only, for the world was constantly with him
whether in the form of exquistie delights,
or obsessive suffering.
Keats: “I never can feel certain of any truth
but from a clear perception of its Beauty.”

8. I have clung
To nothing, lov’d a nothing, nothing seen
Or felt but a great dream! (“Endymion”)
Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no
flower:
O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense
Unhaunted quite of all but nothingness?
(“Ode on Indolence”)