Negative Capability; The Intuitive Approach in Keat's

by Walter Jackson Bate

Reprint of the 1939 ed. published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

96 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Literary critic Walter Jackson Bate twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, first for his work on the Romantic poet John Keats, and later for that on lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson.

Reviews

[Chet]

I read Ode on a Grecian Urn in high school. Went completely over my head. Couldn't get much out of Keats, never revisited him. This book helped reopen the door. I especially enjoyed Bate's method for explaining Keats's urge to constantly get closer and closer to the concrete, further and further from the abstract. Bate goes back and guides readers through Keats's drafts and revisions to illustrate this process:

'...Keats originally wrote: "a heap of candied sweets." Keats at once perceived the lack of strength in "sweets" and he crossed it out and put the more specific "fruits" above it. But "fruits", even, was not sufficiently concrete; and so he enumerated individually: "candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd, and jellies soother than the dairy curd."'

And Bate further points out eventually '"dairy curd" became the more concrete "creamy curd."

When I get the opportunity to teach high school English again (even MS English), I think this would be a fun exercise in conjunction with studying Keats: write a line of poetry, now read it aloud, share it with a partner, now revise it to make your line more *concrete*; repeat.

Would highly recommend this text for other ELA teachers, especially if Keats seems intimidating, as he certainly does to me.

[E. C. Koch · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Keats presents an interesting figure among the (British) Romantics. He came from the city, wasn't well received in his lifetime, and he died early (at only twenty-five), leaving behind an unaccountably large body of work and a whole lot of letters. And because Romanticism is as much a philosophical mode as it is a literary school, these letters provide much for critics and scholars who are interested in defining the idiomatic parameters of each poets Romanticism. And so here Bate composes a monograph dedicated to one of Keats' most significant, if enigmatic, letters, that sent to his brothers Tom and George sometime at the end of December 1817 in which he presents his notion of "Negative Capability" or when a "man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." And that's pretty much all that Keats offers, not having lived long enough to compose a more thorough explication. Now, pretty much everybody who writes seriously about Keats contends in some way with Negative Capability, but these contentions are also pretty limp since they don't go into any kind of depth; they're hit-and-run references, and because of N.C.'s enigmatism, everyone can kind of get away with claiming whatever they want about it. And while that's likely to continue, Bate, for one, tries to offer a full consideration of N.C. by combing through the rest of Keats' letters as well as, of course, his poems. Okay so Bate first conducts a reading of the term “Consequitive reasoning” by contrasting intellect, something the Romantics were skeptical about, with imagination, something they were pretty stoked about. If, as Bate contends, intellect “analyzes rather than synthesizes” and “dissects rather than creates,” then “The Imagination is the direct opposite: it looks inward, grasping by an effort of sympathy and intuition the hidden intention and reality of life; and what it seizes, synthesizes, and creates ‘must be truth—whether it existed before or not.’” After showing intellect with imagination to be antithetical, Bate then equates intellect with stasis and imagination with dynamism. The privileging of movement and synthesis over stasis and dissection is how Bate links N.C. with imagination and imagination with truth. “This intuitive, imaginative element of the mind,” writes Bate, "is essentially synthetic, not only in the concrete shaping and expression of truth but in its momentary seizure of truth as well. It is synthetic in its grasping of truth because it does not, like reason, detect only particular attributes and qualities; it penetrates beyond the external, and by a momentary divining sympathy, 'feels upon its pulse,' as it were, the hidden movement and intention which lie beneath." The poet, employing N.C., accesses an underlying truth that “Consequitive reasoning,” for all its logic and pragmatism, is incapable of uncovering. Keats, Bate urges, conceives of N.C. as a synthesizing tool, marrying the static and dynamic features of objects sensed by the intellect and imagination. And while that all may sound like so much intellectual nonsense, it shows the logic of the looking-glass world the Romantics constructed through verse. Being conceptual from the jump, this all remains abstract, but Bate gives that abstractness just a bit more form, and so is a welcome voice in the Romantic conversation.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is what criticism should look like. Concise, clear, and illuminating.

‘For Negative Capability is not objectivity nor yet Wordsworth's "wise passiveness," although it is indeed objective and passive in nature. Neither is it an implicit trust in the Imagination nor, even, the Shakespearean quality of annihilating one's own identity by becoming at one with the subject, although these too it includes within its scope. These qualities are rather accompaniments and outgrowths of something more primary which underlies them - an acceptance, as I have been saying, of the particular, a love of it and a trust in it; and an acceptance, moreover, with all its "half-knowledge," of the "sense of Beauty, of force, of intensity, that lies within that particular and is indeed its identity and its truth, and which "overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration." It was this devotion to the intensity imbedded within the concrete which is responsible, not only for the astonishing and penetrative revelations of truth, but also for the heavy richness, the slow, clogged - almost drugged - movement, the choked-in fullness of Keats's finest lines, which gives him a strength with all his luxury, and which keeps his sensuousness firm and vital. And it was this devotion, too, which led him, as he increased in years, to love life with all the gusto of a Chaucer or a Shakespeare, to delight in human beings, whether they were lagos or Imogens, and to sympathize with them individually and as particulars; for at work within each of them is a nervous and instine-tive force, a peculiar identity, which was for Keats their beauty and their truth.’