JOHN KEATS’S THEORY OF “NEGATIVE CAPABILITY”

The most living thing in Keats’s poetry is the recreation of sensuous beauty, first as a source of delight for its own sake, then as a symbol of the life of the mind and the emotions. Speculated and philosophical interests always formed the major part of Shelley’s experience and the young Wordsworth for a time was hag – ridden by them: there is almost no trace of this in Keats. Keats did not like to foster abstract thought in himself and his poetry. He cared little for it. In fact, he resented intellectual truths which make demands upon the mind without being verifiable in immediate experience. Keats differs from Shelley on the point of intellectualization of his poetry and his advice against it and the other is his opinion about Truth coming through Beauty.

David Daiches, in his book Critical Approaches to Literature, Longman, 1977, gives a lengthy explanation of Wordsworth’s statement –

           The distinction that Wordsworth makes between truth “individual and local” and truth “general and operative” is similar to Aristotle’s distinction between historical and poetic truth, and it is linked also to the question of recognition. Poetic truth for Wordsworth is “operative” – it works on us, it carries its own conviction with it, so that we cannot but acknowledge it as true. “Individual and local” truth does not carry its own conviction: before we could be sure that a historian or a biographer was telling the truth we should have to know what his sources were and how honestly he used them. The poet’s truth is general in the sense that it needs no authentication to be recognized as true: it does not “stand upon external testimony” but is “carried alive into the heart by passion” and is thus its own testimony. Our hearts recognize it as true – not necessary because we have known it before, but because the psychological structure of our minds assents to it, it makes contact somehow with the basic mental laws which determine human perception and emotion.

The poet, thus, should have the capability to negate the individual into the general. Only this negation has the capacity to create “Remembrance” in the mind of the reader and thereby give pleasure to him – a pleasure that is the true purpose of Poetry. Wordsworth probes deeper into the reasons why general representation of human nature pleases us. The pleasure we derive from it comes from our having our basic psychological structure is paralleled in the working of the universe as a whole, and one reason why the poet is able to express truths which are general and operative is that he is “a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings – on of the universe, and habitually pleasure “ to a human Being possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as a Man.”

The poet “binds together the vast empire of human society” by revealing the common psychological laws which underlie all sensation and all sensitivity, and revealing it not by showing through the persuasive concrete illustration – which may be drawn from the experience of a humble or even half – witted person, a shepherd, a leech – gatherer, or an idiot boy – the primary laws of human nature. The poet thus reveals the relationship of men both to each other and to the external world. Keats has found fault with Wordsworth’s formula of “egotistical sublime”. This phrase refers to two things. First it talks of intellectual truths in art and secondly, it gives a personality to the poet. Both are disliked by Keats for they come in the way of the poet’s negative capability. He says –

Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved on our pulses. We read fine things, but never feel them to the full till we have gone the same steps as the author.

For Keats, the necessary pre – condition of poetry is submission to things as they are, without trying to intellectualize them into something else, submission to people as they are, without trying to indoctrinate or improve them. Keats found this quality at its fullest in Shakespeare –

        …. 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 man is capable of being in uncertainties.

 This way of feeling grows naturally into a strong active and dramatic tendency, a wish to participate into the life of others, and an understanding of other people. Often Keats feels that this participation in the life of others, “the agony and strife of human hearts”, ought to be the mainspring of his poetry. But it is not although he was always striving towards that and it is believed perfection in this respect if he would have lived longer.

The total impression of the moment, the fusion of his own subjective emotion with sensations from the outside world is the ultimate reality for him. In his letters we are frequently reminded of such a fusion scarcely remember counting upon any Happiness.

He is still the relaxed and sensuous man. But he knows that it is all exquisite and also utterly transitory. This knowledge is followed by a strong desire for world in which such moments could become eternal. All the Odes have this theme of transience and permanency. Keats problem, throughout his life, has been how to reconcile this contradiction. Can he achieve it in his life and in Poetry? Keats was not different from other Romantic poets for whom any serene conclusion free from any contradiction was not possible because of their longing for a world of flux, a world where on a shadowy island of bliss they could forget the world. So the element of conflict is always there in their life and poetry, so fusion always escapes them, keeping it just on the level of desire. However, Keats’s attempt goes on although he shows that he does not know the definite way.

He feels that he can find it in his interior landscape, not in any objective world, not in any power outside himself. He wants to find it in the immediately experienced moment. He says that “we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere” of such moments. But among the effects they give rise it is that “of convincing one’s nerves that the world is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and Oppression”. This feeling of “Misery” always follows him when he tries to enjoy the sensation and sensuousness – pure and serene.

Mortal beauties pass away, but not those of art. The poet realizes that the real human experience suffering sickness, sorrow and early death cannot escape the conflict. On the level of poetic creation the conflict disappears. Transitory human happiness is given permanence in a different sense by being embodied in art.

It is in vain to escape pain; it is inevitable. Joy and Beauty are transient and therein lay the source of melancholy.

In the Odes, Keats does not come to any conclusion and makes no synthesis. He also does not remove confusion between the permanent values reached with some speculative solution in some belief and value permanently accessible to the individual. And man is advised not to think anything beyond that. That is why – Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, –

All the Odes have their source in conflict and the resolution is uncertain. That makes them supreme examples of Negative Capability. Grahm Hough, in his book The Romantic Poets (1963), says – “they are in fact supreme examples of Negative Capability, ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’.” He believes in them and so his solution is incomplete. It is also in the nature of human life.

Keats’s idea of Negative Capability has been identified with the idea of poet’s impersonality. This identification is suggested by Keats’s poem Ode to a Nightingale which has been taken by many critics as a poem explaining Keats’s idea about poetry in general. It has been read as a poem about poetry itself. Specifically, it is a Romantic kind of poetry. A key term for Romantic poetry is imagination. For Keats, the imagination was primarily a means of achieving a sympathetic oneness between the self and other things – between an observing human being and the person, creature or object being observed. Keats suggests in his letters that the poetic imagination is exhibited by the poet’s capacity to dissolve his own identity in an act of empathy, with something outside the self. He writes that the “Poetical Character…. Has no self – it is everything and nothing – It has no character…. A Poet is the most un-poetical of anything in existence because he has no Identity”. Instead, the poet is continually informing “filling some other Body”. Keats’s account of the poetic imagination and the character of the poet lend further support to the claim that Ode to a Nightingale is a poem about poetry since its speaker (the poet) strives to escape from suffering by losing his own identity and becoming one with the nightingale through an act of sympathetic identification. It is the poetic imagination – the “wings of Poesy” which holds out the greatest promise for such a merging of speaker and bird.

 In modern criticism Keats’s Negative Capability has been given a new meaning. It has been taken as being very close to the modern literary theory of ambiguity. In their book Reading Poetry, an Introduction, Tom Furniss and Michael Bath (Pearson Education 1996) have this to say about Keats’s Negative Capability –

      In poetry, then, ambiguity can serve to enrich and complicate meaning in ways which may allow us to reread poems many times without feeling that they have become obvious or stale. It is often the ambiguity of a poem which gives it its subtle charge or makes it challenging and continually interesting and stimulating. An ambiguous moment in a poem can continue to intrigue us even after reading it many times. In fact, we would conclude by arguing that the ability to remain open to potential ambiguity, rather than attempting to find the ‘proper’ meaning, is one of the skills or attitudes which are crucial to develop in reading poetry. In this way, we would be developing a response towards poems reminiscent of Keats’s description of what he called ‘Negative Capability’:

         ….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, is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

 Ambiguity is a poem consists of confusion, uncertainty and doubt about the meaning of the poem. Although the celebration of ambiguity in literature is largely a twentieth – century development, creative writers throughout history have exploited ambiguity for various literary effects. Although Classical and Neoclassical rhetoric sought to eliminate ambiguity as a fault, all writers followed the rule of propriety. Shakespeare played with the ambiguities of language almost as much as Joyce. Although Samuel Johnson rebuked Shakespeare for indulging in punning, such pillars of Augustan poetry as Pope made brilliant use of puns and double meanings. In this sense, twentieth – century literary criticism can be said to have caught on to an important aspect of literary practice which earlier critics had either disapproved of or been blind to. Keats was aware of it in another way.