Thinking Activity (Keats)

This blog is a response to a task assigned by Megha Ma'am (Department of English, MKBU). In this blog, a question is discussed related to the Keats writing as a part of the paper 'Romantic Era'.

Que : What is negative capability? Explain with the example of Keats' one of the poems.

Ans. 

John Keats was born in London on October 31, 1795, the eldest of Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats’s four children. Although he died at the age of twenty-five, Keats had perhaps the most remarkable career of any English poet. He published only fifty-four poems in three slim volumes and a few magazines. But over his short development, he took on the challenges of a wide range of poetic forms, from the sonnet to the Spenserian romance to the Miltonic epic, defining anew their possibilities with his own distinctive fusion of earnest energy, control of conflicting perspectives and forces, poetic self-consciousness, and, occasionally, dry ironic wit.

Posthumous portrait of Keats by William Hilton, National Portrait Gallery, London (c. 1822)

Keats has that quality of negative capability, which means he could create something good out of the great sorrow. Negative capability means when a person becomes undisturbed by the surrounding environment of life and doesn't seek an answer to the question or escape from the pain but rather accepts things as they are. Keats wrote his best poetry during the days when he was suffering great pain, but still, he wrote the best work of his life.

In his poem 'Ode to the Autumn', he describes autumn as a lively season, but in literature, autumn is considered a season of sadness and melancholy. So in this poem, he describes how autumn is beautiful with its dried leaves, flowers, and ripened fruits. He describes the beauty of autumn. It has its own place in all seasons. In the poem, the poet finds beauty even in the season, which is considered a negative one. Here we can find the use of the poet's negative capability to create something creative out of a gloomy environment.