Negative Capability
From Freepedia
Negative Capability is a theory of the poet John Keats, expressed in his letter to George and Thomas Keats dated Sunday, 21 December 1817.
- I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason
Keats believed that great people (especially poets) have the ability to accept that not everything can be resolved - being capable of remaining negative on something. Keats was a Romantic and believed that the truths found in the imagination access holy authority. Such authority cannot otherwise be understood, and thus he writes of "uncertainties." This "being in uncertaint[y]" is a place between the mundane and ready reality and the multiple potentials of a more fully understood existance.
Keats expressed this idea in several of his poems
- La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad (1819)
- Ode to a Nightingale (1819)
- The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (1819)
