Keats's negatives capability

Topic: - “KEATS’S NEGATIVES CAPABILITY”

Name: - Chauhan Sejal Arunbhai

Subject: - The Romantic Literature

Paper: - 5

Roll No: -28

M.A. Part- I SEM - II

Year: - 2013-15

Submitted to:-Heenamem

M.K.Bhavanagar University .

KEATS’S NEGATIVES CAPABILITY : -

CONCEPT OF ‘NEGATIVE CAPABILITY’

To establish a new concept is, in a sense, the measure of a critic’s originality. He offers a new term or re-interprets an established term for aesthetic revolutions, and brings to bear upon it the rigour of abstract thinking and the sensitivity of perception. T.S.Eliot’s phrases ‘Objective Correlative’ and ‘The Dissociation of Sensibility’ have this precision and rigour but Keats’s phrase ‘Negative Capability’ lacks it. It is in the nature of a speculative querry rather rather than a philosophical concept. 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.

Although Keats’s phrase ‘Negative Capability’ is not in the nature of a philosophical concept, it provides a rare insight into creative psychology which conditions the character of an artwork. What he has in mind is clear. Shakespeare is able to dramatise a diversity at attitudes and temperaments, and his imaginative flexibility is such that in a great play like I Henry IV or Hamlet, characters seem to have remarkable autonomy; we do not feel that characterization is being manipulated in the interests of some propagandist statement. Nevertheless, Keats’s notion of Negative Capability underestimates the often complex but firm control exerted by Shakespeare’s co-ordinating imagination: a clear and consistent series of moral and political recommendations emerges from the rich diversities of the various plays.

The ‘Negative Capability’ idea is a half-truth; for though the great artist gives life to a wide variety of human possibilities, those possibilities are purposefully co-ordinated. What is important about the notion for Keats is that it was an enabling half truth. At a stroke, it enabled him to convert a liability into an asset. The liability was his lack of system or doctrine; ‘Negative Capability, was a liecence to regard such a lack as a liberation. His dilettantism could be seen as flexibility; his lack of doctrine could itself become a doctrine. Keats had often felt that he lacked the raw materials for great art: ‘Negative Capability’ gave him confidence and implied the dialectical basis for the structures of future poems. He developed the idea in the following year by declaring that the ‘poetical character’ has ‘as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the camelion poet. These words may remind us of William Blake’s Exuberance is Beauty’, but there is no evidence that Keats knew Blake’s work. What is certain is that Keats’s ideas in late1817 and 1818 are indebted to William Hazlitt.

KEATS FOUND ‘NEGATIVE CAPABILITY’ IN SHAKESPEARE : -

For Keats, the necessary precondition 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 in Shakespeare. This quality is his understanding of contrary points of view. It may be interpreted as tolerance, as agnosticism or eclecticism. In December 1817, Keats offered his formulation of ‘NEGATIVE CAPABILIY’ in his letter to George and Tom: “….several things dovertaled in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a man of Achievements, especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously_I meal ‘NEGATIVE CAPABILITY’ that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.

KEATS’S INDEBTEDNESS TO HAZLITT : -

C.D.THORPE, Rene Wellek, W.J.Bate and Cedric Watts have showed Keats’s debt to Hazlitt in the formulation of his conception of ‘NEGATIVE CAPABILITY’, Keats attended Hazlitt’ lectures and read his articles with eagerness, applauding his ‘depth of taste’ on 14 September he dined with him, and on 18 October walked with him. Hazlitt’ favourite theme was the supreme versatility of Shakespeare’s genius. He cited with approval Schlegel’s pronouncement on Shakespeare:

He unites in his genius utmost elevation and the utmost depth; and the most foreign and even apparently irreconcilable properties subsist in him peaceably together:

and Hazlitt himself proclaimed:

He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egoist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that the others were, or that they could become…….His genius shone equally on the evil and the good…………………..

Shakespeare’s imagination…………………..unites the most opposite extremes.

In Hazlitt’s eloquent tributes to Shakespeare we discover hat is probably the main literary source of Keats’s celebrated speculations about ‘NEGATIVE CAPABILITY’ and the ‘poetical character’.

‘NEGATIVE CAPABILITY’ DEFINED : -

What is after all the meaning of Keats’s notion of Negative Capability? The concept of ‘Negative Capability ‘ involves self annihilation of disinterestedness. Keats discovers that to comprehend experience and attain freedom from its bondage, what is necessary is self-annihilation. It requires that an essential quality of a great poet is his immense capacity of sympathetic identification with some object dearer to him than himself. Keats believed thot Wordsworth and Coleridge did not possess ‘Negative Capability ‘. Wordsworth could not annihilate the self-or more precisely, the ego, for the yawning ego hinders disinterested perception and action, and leads to involvement in experience. As for Coleridge, he ‘ Would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge’ Keats believed that Shakespeare exemplified to a remarkable degree, the power of self-absorption as well as wonderful sympathy and identification with variety of experiences.

HOW CAN ‘NEGATIVE CAPABILITY’ BE GAINED IN POETRY?

Keats believes that ‘Negative Capability’ is the grounding submission to the chaos of experience. It is antithetical to fact, reason and order. The knowledge received through this process is half-knowledge, not verifiable or analyzable, and this half-knowledge leads to doubt and uncertainty about the nature of reality. It is both a quality and an activity, both restful and restive. It is both a quality and an activity, both restful and restive , this is what distinguishes speculative inquiry from the philosophical mode which ends in certainty. Reason or philosophy imposes a pattern on reality , the speculative mind rejects this pattern on reality as arbitrary and seeks to confront reality itself, while realizing at the same time that reality can never be known completely.

Scepticism is here defended as a positive faith. There is also an added implication that the barrier between reality and the perceiving mind is the self, the intellectual faculty, which must be effaced. Keats concludes his remarks about ‘NAGATIVE CAPABILITY’ with the observation that “with a great poet, the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration or rather obliterates all consideration”. Shakespeare was a great odorer of beauty. He looked at human life with all its evil and pain but he saw it so intensely that it be came an element of beauty. Shakespeare took delight in rendering both joys and sorrows, both good evil, Keats, however, saw Shakespeare as pre-eminently a poet of sorrow and some of his marking and underscoring in the sonnets of Shakespeare during the years 1819 and 1820 show a sensitive response to Shakespeare’s poetry of pain. Some of the passages especially noted by Keats are:

O ! how can Love’s eye be true, That is so vex’d with watching and with tears ?

Is it thy will thy image should keep open My heavy eyelids to the weary night ?

SYMPATHETIC IDETIFICATION : -

NEGATIVE CAPABILITY is a theory of sympathetic identification in which the poet takes on, through participation, the qualities and character of his object. It should be differentiated from Eiufnhulung or empathy, with its suggestion that many of these qualities are merely the subjective creation of the poet or observer, and are bestowed upon the object rather than described in it. Einfuhlung is the power of projecting one’s personality into the object of contemplation. The poetry of Keats contains abundant examples of both ‘Negative Capability’ and Einfuhlung as the guiding characteristics of his verse.

FAILURE OF KEATS IN ACHIEVING NEGATIVE CAPABILITY’ IN HIS EARLY POEMS : -

Let us now examine how far ‘Negative Capability’ is found in the poetry of Keats. The early poems of Keats up to Endymion show that Keats had not succeeded to distance himself from the object of his poetry. Allen Rodway in his book The Romantic Conflict says that Keats might seem inescapably imprisoned in the life of sensation, and held as an ideal for the artist the amoral, asesthetic conception of ‘Negative Capability’. Yet, on the other hand, there is evidence throughout his career from Sleep and Poetry to Lamia or the second Hyperion of a strong contradiction to the doctrine of ‘Negative Capability’ he asserted the need to acquire though experience a positive ethical identity. In spite of his striviag after ‘Negative Capability’ he remained essentially a romantic poet as he subjective through and through, for example Keats’s life is reflected in Ode to a Nightingale. If in his early poetry he craved for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts, in his later poetry he crossed the boundary of the world of Flora and Pan. He evinced his inclination to philosophy and to use poetry in the service of humanity. In one of his poems he insisted that moral progress depends on deep felt sympathy and love:

None can usurp this height

But those to whom the miseries of the world

Are misery, and will not let them rest.

Again, he said in Sleep and Poetry:

And can I ever bid these joys farewell?

Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life

Where I may find the agonies, the strife of human heart.

NO ARRIVINGAT DEFINITE CONCLUSION THROUGH REASONING : -

Keats stated that a poet gifted with ‘Negative Capability’ does not attempt to arrive at some definite conclusion through reasoning and argumentation. He simply presents the paradox of the world without resolving them logically. This is exactly what Keats does his great Odes. In this respect Graham Hough says, “They come to no conclusion and make no synthesis, they process solely by the methods peculiar to poetry, not by the aid of the speculative intelligence. They are in fact supreme examples of ‘Negative Capability’. Holloway also observes, “In a word, the Odes are not only products of what Keats called ‘Negative Capability’ but taken together are a unique full account of what it is like and how it develops”.

NEGATIVE CAPACITY EXEMPLIFIED THROUGH KEATS’S ODES : -

The Odes of  Keats are supreme examples of  ‘Negative  Capability.’ Since they produced solely by the methods peculiar to poetry, not by the aid of the speculative intelligence . We can trace the examples of ‘Negative Capability’ in some of Keats’s Odes. In Ode to Indolence the poet is in a state of restlessness, uncertainty and doubt. In Ode on a Grecian Urn the picture of an empty city with its people on their pilgrimage to a shrine is an example of Keats’s ‘Negative Capability.’ The  poet asks :

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

And all her silken ffank with garlands drest ?

What little town by river or sea shore

Or mountain built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?

KEAT’S INSISTENCE ON SELF-EFFACEMENT AND NON-ATTACHMENT : -

Keats had a wonderful power of self-effacement and identification with the object. In a letter to Richard Wordhouse, 27 October, 1818, he stated, “A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling somebody………..It is a wretched thing to confess, but it is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical Nature how can it, when I have no Nature?” Sometimes he was skeptical and in mood he even no questioned the truth of poetry itself : ‘ I am sometimes so very skeptical as to think poetry itself a mere Jack a lanthern to amuse whoever may chance to be stuck with its brilliance”. Along with its scepticism about poetry . There was also a craving for non-attachment in Keats. To quote Fred Inglis, “ He is not as great  as Shakespeare, not as many English poets; but he has, to a remarkable degree, that same power of self-absorption, that wonderful sympathy and identification with all things, that Negative Capability which he saw as essential to he creation of great poetry and which Shakespeare exemplified so abundantly. He himself wrote of Shakespeare. ‘His life was an allegory, and his works are the comments on it.’ So was Keats’s own.’’