Keats’s best-known doctrine, “Negative Capability”, implies that there is an engagement in the imaginative identification that transcends. The phrase was first used in 1817 in a letter Keats wrote to his brothers. It was used to explain the capacity of the greatest writers, particularly in conversation with William Shakespeare, to pursue a vision of artistic beauty. This occurs even when the vision or imagination leads a writer to uncertainty or confusion. Keats argues that artistic beauty should take precedence over philosophical certainty. Since then, the term has been used by poets and philosophers to describe the capability of perceiving and recognizing truths.
Essentially, Keats argues that literary achievement is a willingness to let the mysterious and doubtful remain that way. An author possessing Negative Capability should be objective and emotionally detached, rather than writing with didactic purposes. These literary works have depths and beauties that make conventional morality and truth irrelevant. Negative Capability implies that the artist loses their selfhood in their work as it demands a single meaning and identifies with the experience of the object. The object lets its experience speak through the writer. The conscious soul and the world become more dynamic when they are open to each other. Art’s “truth” is this transformation.
This concept rejects philosophy and preconceived ideas of nature. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a first-generation Romantic poet, was a target of younger poets for being interested in German idealistic philosophy. Keats highlights how Shakespeare’s poetry articulated many points of view, but never advocated for a particular view or vision of the truth. Keats demanded receptive poetry, not poetry that aimed to seek absolute knowledge or reasoning.
Resources
“Negative Capability.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/art/negative-capability. 2021.
Kaufman, Robert. “Negatively Capable Dialectics: Keats, Vendler, Adorno, and the Theory of the Avant-Garde.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 27, no. 2, 2001, pp. 354–384. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1344254.