Assignment 3: Negative Capability in Keats's Poetry

Topic of the Blog:

This blog is part of an assignment for the paper 103 - Literature of the Romantics, Sem - 1, 2023.

Personal Information: 

Name: Yashrajsinh Sodha

Batch: M.A. sem-1 (2023-25)

Enrollment Number: 5108230043

Email: yashrajsinhsodha0000@gmail.com

Roll Number: 34  

Assignment Details: 

Topic:- Negative Capability in Keats's Poetry 

Paper & subject code:- 103- Literature of the Romantics & 22394

Submitted to:- Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, MKBU, Bhavnagar 

Date of Submission:- 27th November, 2023

John Keats:

John Keats, (born October 31, 1795, London, England—died February 23, 1821, Rome, Papal States [Italy]), English Romantic lyric poet who devoted his short life to the perfection of a poetry marked by vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal, and an attempt to express a philosophy through classical legend.

The son of a livery-stable manager, John Keats received relatively little formal education. His father died in 1804, and his mother remarried almost immediately. Throughout his life Keats had close emotional ties to his sister, Fanny, and his two brothers, George and Tom. After the breakup of their mother’s second marriage, the Keats children lived with their widowed grandmother at Edmonton, Middlesex. John attended a school at Enfield, two miles away, that was run by John Clarke, whose son Charles Cowden Clarke did much to encourage Keats’s literary aspirations.

At school Keats was noted as a pugnacious lad and was decidedly “not literary,” but in 1809 he began to read voraciously. After the death of the Keats children’s mother in 1810, their grandmother put the children’s affairs into the hands of a guardian, Richard Abbey. At Abbey’s instigation John Keats was apprenticed to a surgeon at Edmonton in 1811. He broke off his apprenticeship in 1814 and went to live in London, where he worked as a dresser, or junior house surgeon, at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ hospitals. His literary interests had crystallized by this time, and after 1817 he devoted himself entirely to poetry. From then until his early death, the story of his life is largely the story of the poetry he wrote. (Hough)

What is Negative Capability:

Negative capability, a writer’s ability, “which Shakespeare possessed so enormously,” to accept “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” according to English poet John Keats, who first used the term in an 1817 letter. An author possessing negative capability is objective and emotionally detached, as opposed to one who writes for didactic purposes; a literary work possessing negative capability may have beauties and depths that make conventional considerations of truth and morality irrelevant. (Britannica)

Negative Capability in Keats's Poetry:

The sensational statements are quite varied and subtle in effect, ranging from simple assertions of silence paradoxically described to lines which are the penetrating expression of a tense and deeply moving situation. One remembers a number of examples of the first variety: from I Stood Tiptoe, "A little noiseless noise among the leaves,Born of the very sigh that silence heaves." In Endymion silence becomes particularly meaningful. Endymion in the Cave of Quietude, for example, is in a spot "Where silence dreariest is most articulate. "In another instance he complains that upon his ear "a noisy nothing rings," and he wishes once more to hear the linnet's note. Shortly there- after he is puzzled and pleased by the music from Cupid's lyre: "... then the sounds again / Went noiseless as a passing noontide rain / Over a bower." In all of these the suggestions of positive sound, indeed "not-noiselessness," are so strong as, in the Miltonic sense, to touch our trembling ears. (Starr)

This subtle suggestion of sound is particularly effective when Keats deals with water, especially running streams. In The Fall of Hyperion (and in the earlier Hyperion also), after a very suggestive passage of negative statement beginning "No stir of life / Was in this shrouded vale" we read that "A stream went voiceless by." And a passage in Hyperion emphasises the delicacy of sound produced by ocean waves: "Throughout all this, There was no covert, no retired cave Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves Though scarcely heard in many a green recess." A final reference to water: lest Keats be accused of seeing magic only in mythological streams one may cite a passage from Lines Written in the Highlands after a Visit to Burns's Country: "Runnels may kiss the grass on shelves and shallows clear, but their low voices are not heard, though come on travels drear."

The picture of the soul which emerges in the Ode to Psyche, though certainly not profound, is clearly an expression of a ruminative phase of Keats's experience, and in its rejections is an interesting contrast to the attitude which made possible his catalogue of luxuries in Sleep and Poetry.

"Fairer than these, though temple hast thou none,

Nor altar heap'd with flowers;

Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan

Upon the midnight hours;

No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet

From chain-swung censer teeming;

No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat

Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming"

Again, in Endymion we can be sure that Keats in wish-fulfilment is projecting himself into experience when he writes that

"……there was not a slope

Up which he had not fear'd the antelope;

And not a tree, beneath whose rooty shade

He had not with his tamed leopards play'd."

This kind of sensuous identification of the poet Keats with a world of pleasurable experience, in an effort, within the conditions of Negative Capability, to deny worldly delights and by implication to exorcise vexations, takes on a more insistent note, sometimes confident, often despairing. He had never breathed the "pure serene" of Homer's world until he read Chapman; at the other end of the scale, Endymion in his misery "cannot see the heavens, nor the flow / Of rivers, nor hill-flowers running wild." The sense of desolate deprivation, of almost masochistic rejection of delight in a Keats who tried to be above personal happiness is expressed with stunning force in La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

The world in which the "wretched wight" finds himself is as dead and deso- late as T. S. Eliot's land of the Hollow Men: "The sedge is wither'd from the lake / And no birds sing." Yet note again the mastery of sug- gestion. Even in his most determined rejections Keats can never dis- miss the world of sensuous delight. In our mind's eye we see the lux- uriant green reeds of spring along the shore of the lake, beside which melodious birds sing madrigals. And with what amazing versatility and virtuosity does Keats transcend the uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts of earthly experience in his Ode on a Grecian Urn! Here, in contrast to the dark magic of La Belle Dame, is the sunlight of ancient Greece, and a relic which is the eternal reminder of unheard melodies of ravishing beauty and of a lover whose love can never endure earthly change. Save perhaps for the flawless portrayal of the ripe harvest sea- son in the Ode to Autumn, the Ode on a Grecian Urn embodies the most serene and moving expression of Keats's Negative Capability. (Starr)

Again and again we catch the suggestion that Keats would never be able to achieve the detachment he desired, because the impossibility of fully realizing or describing worldly delights seems to bring about his heart an "indescribable feud." In his early poem, To My Brother George, he says:

"Full many a dreary hour have I past, 

My brain bewilder'd, and my mind o'ercast 

With heaviness; in seasons when I've thought No spherey strains by me could e'er be caught That I should never hear Apollo's song, 

... That the still murmur of the honey bee 

Would never teach a rural song to me: 

That the bright glance from beauty's eyelids slanting 

Would never make a lay of mine enchanting."

The most interesting revelation of Keats's inner conflict is found in the Ode to a Nightingale. Here the tone is completely different from the serenity and the lofty detachment of the Ode on a Grecian Urn. From the very first word the emphasis is on Keats himself and the life which presses so inexorably upon him. (Starr)

Conclusion:  

To conclude the discussion we can say that the exploration of Negative Capability in Keats's poetry unveils a profound dimension of his artistic philosophy. Keats's ability to embrace uncertainty, doubt, and the complexities of human experience is evident in his poetic works. The concept of Negative Capability, as articulated by Keats, transcends the limitations of rationality, allowing for a more profound engagement with the mysteries of existence. Through a careful analysis of his poems, we witness Keats's capacity to dwell in uncertainties, appreciate the beauty of ambiguity, and convey the profound truths inherent in the complexities of life. The application of Negative Capability in Keats's poetry not only marks a departure from conventional poetic ideals but also establishes him as a poetic pioneer whose work continues to inspire contemplation and reflection on the enigmatic nature of the human condition.

References: 

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "negative capability". Encyclopedia Britannica, 21 Apr. 2017, https://www.britannica.com/art/negative-capability. Accessed 26 November 2023.

Hough, Graham Goulder. "John Keats". Encyclopedia Britannica, 27 Oct. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Keats. Accessed 26 November 2023.

Starr, Nathan Comfort. “Negative Capability in Keats’s Diction.” Keats-Shelley Journal, vol. 15, 1966, pp. 59–68. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30209856. Accessed 26 Nov. 2023.

Words Count: 1552

Photos: 2