John Keats and Negative Capability

The beauty of "the mystery."

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The Triumph of the Innocents // William Holman Hunt (Keats loved the Pre-Raphaelites)

I was forced to take a graduate-level course on British Romanticism, and for that I’m grateful. Before this class I knew of John Keats, having read two or three of his poems, but I now consider him one of my favorite writers and thinkers; not only for his poetry but also for his letters, comparable to the essays of any prominent writer.

Keats died young, on February 23, 1821, at twenty-five. Like his brother, whom he’d lost only two years earlier, he died of tuberculosis (called, in those days, consumption). His early death only makes the breadth of his work all the more remarkable. By his early twenties Keats had created a personal philosophy, informed by Shakespeare and Milton as well as his contemporaries— Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Hazlitt (amongst others).

Keats was unlike his contemporaries in several ways; one being that he came from poverty, not wealth. I think this allowed him to see through the artifice of British high society. He explored the ephemeral and was less interested in the material. Although he longed for acceptance (and was torn apart by critics early in his career), he also knew that fame was an empty pursuit, and sought refuge in his writing, thinking, and friendships.

Here he describes negative capability in a letter to his brothers (December 1817):

“…I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason…that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”

Keats is arguing for presence with what is. In my own interpretation I think of my mother’s suicide, and the pain that came both before and afterwards. Such a high intensity of pain that it felt as if my skin had been torn from both my body and soul and I could see the world more clearly. The loss and its complications awakened me. I remember sitting at a booth in a restaurant we used to frequent, in Pike Place Market, looking out the window and thinking of her. As I looked, I saw a large bush and watched it interact with the wind. The bush stilled and trembled and heaved with the wind. It fascinated me and became a momentary refuge. With my heightened senses the world wasn’t only more painful but also more beautiful. Since then, I’ve come to understand that there is never one without the other.

In the same letter Keats wrote: “…the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all the disagreeable evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beaut & Truth…”

Portrait of John Keats by William Hilton

Of poetry he wrote:

“We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us— and if we do not agree it seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle or amaze with itself but with its subject.— How beautiful the retired flowers! how they would lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, ‘admire me I am a violet! dote on me I am a primrose!” (this was in reference to Wordsworth’s poetry).

After reading this short passage I contemplate today’s moment, where we are constantly hailed by the fast-moving consumption machine. This machine asks us to be like the flowers “thronging into the highway” and asking to be loved, or given attention. So many of us weren’t given love and attention to begin with— and the love and attention we seek through social media and other capitalist modes of devouring is not really love or attention. Not truly.

I ask myself: to what am I truly giving my attention?

At the moment I typed this (I am sitting outside) a mourning dove landed less than a foot from me and gazed my way with her curious eye. She pecks through my small yard, gathering stray yellow strands of grass for her nest. She chirps and flutters into a small tree and observes the world from above. I give her my attention and she gives me so much in return. Her whole being and existence are there. But I can never have her, or anything, really. Nothing in this world can be had in the way we’ve been taught to want it.

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This weekend I’m beginning a paper about Negative Capability and Keats’s ode “To Autumn.” The poem resides in a liminal space, veering with juxtapositions. Death and life coexist. I’ll leave you with the poem. (for some reason Substack is refusing to adhere to the poem’s structure, so here’s a link as well).

To Autumn Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cider-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours. Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft, And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. —John Keats (September 19, 1819)