Stephen Hebron explores Keats�s understanding of negative capability, a concept

which prizes intuition and uncertainty above reason and knowledge.

In December 1817 John Keats was returning from the Christmas pantomime with his
friends Charles Wentworth Dilke and Charles Brown. On the walk home, he later told
his brothers George and Tom, he got into a �disquisition� with Dilke on a number of
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 a man is capable of being in
uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact &
reason � Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude
caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content
with half knowledge.[1]
It is a famous passage; and it is entirely characteristic of Keats that he should
come up with one of his most telling phrases (�Negative Capability�) in such an
impromptu fashion, without preamble or lengthy explanation. His language is not
immediately clear, but richly suggestive and idiosyncratic.

What does Keats mean by �negative capability�? Clearly, he is using the word
�negative� not in a pejorative sense, but to convey the idea that a person�s
potential can be defined by what he or she does not possess � in this case a need
to be clever, a determination to work everything out. Essential to literary
achievement, Keats argues, is a certain passivity, a willingness to let what is
mysterious or doubtful remain just that. His fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
he suggests, would do well to break off from his relentless search for knowledge,
and instead contemplate something beautiful and true (�a fine verisimilitude�)
caught, as if by accident, from the most secret part (�Penetralium�) of mystery.
The experience and intuitive appreciation of the beautiful is, indeed, central to
poetic talent, and renders irrelevant anything that is arrived at through reason.
Keats ends his brief discussion of negative capability by concluding that �with a
great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather
obliterates all consideration�.

The poetical character

Keats never repeated the phrase �negative capability� in his letters. Like similar
nuggets found throughout his correspondence, it is of the moment, prompted by a
desire to share his latest thoughts with his friends; it is not part of an
overarching intellectual structure. But it is prefigured in a slightly earlier
letter, written to Benjamin Bailey on 22 November 1817, in which Keats observed
that he was unable to see �how any thing can be known for truth by consequitive
[sic] reasoning � can it be that even the greatest Philosopher ever arrived at his
goal without putting aside numerous objections � However it may be, O for a Life of
Sensations rather than of Thoughts!�.[2]
And Keats touched again on the idea of the passivity, humility even, of a great
writer, in a letter he wrote to his friend Richard Woodhouse on 27 October
following year. The �poetical Character�, he maintained,

is not itself � it has no self � it is everything and nothing � It has no character

� it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low,
rich or poor, mean or elevated � It has as much delight in an Iago [the villain of
Shakespeare�s Othello] as an Imogen [Shakespeare�s heroine in Cymbeline]. What
shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the camelion Poet.[3]
The word �gusto� was used by Keats�s contemporary, the essayist and critic William
Hazlitt, to describe the power and passion with which an artist creates another
form. �The infinite quantity of dramatic invention in Shakespeare takes from his
gusto�, Hazlitt wrote in the Examiner on 26 May 1816; �The power he delights to
show is not intense, but discursive. He never insists on any thing as much as he
might, except a quibble.�

Keats, who knew Hazlitt and was influenced by his writing, developed this idea. He
found an �indescribable gusto� in the voice of his favourite actor, Edmund Kean,
who completely inhabited the parts he played. Great poets, argued Keats, had gusto
because they were not impeded in their work by an identity of their own, with
personal opinions that might affect the independence and freedom of the characters
they create: a poet, he told Woodhouse, �has no Identity � he is continually
informing and filling some other Body�

Men of genius

Keats recognised the chameleon aspect of his own nature. He would watch sparrows
from his window and pick about with them in the gravel. He would imagine the
delight a billiard ball might take in its own roundness, in its smooth, rapid
motion. More dramatically, he told Woodhouse how, in a room full of people, he
would quickly be �annihilated� by the different identities pressing upon him. But
that was the nature of poets, of the men of genius Keats habitually measured
himself against. He told his friend Benjamin Bailey on 27 November 1817:

In passing however I must say one thing that has pressed upon me lately and
increased my Humility and capability of submission, and that is this truth � Men of
Genius are great as certain ethereal Chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral
intellect � but they have not any individuality, any determined Character.[5]
First among these men of genius, for Keats, was Shakespeare, who possessed negative
capability �so enormously�. When he was beginning his first long poem, Endymion, on
the Isle of Wight in 1817, Keats imagined Shakespeare as the genius presiding over
him. The thoughts on literature which he shared in his letters are always deeply
interesting, but their power also comes from their urgency, an urgency derived from
the single-minded dedication with which Keats pursued his ambition to become a
great poet.