KEATS’ NEGATIVE CAPABILITY 

 

John Keats did a great service to English poetry in special and English language in general. Here, we are concerned to discuss his negative capability.

 

Negative capability in Literature is a capacity to negate one’s individual personality and to identify oneself with the object that the writer wants to portray at in his work of art.

 

Keats had capacity to insert himself into anything he saw or heard. He used to accept it and identify himself with it. In one of his poems, Keats says;

 

“If a sparrow comes in my window,

I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.”

 

According to John Keats, a poet has no identity. He forcibly remarked once;

 

“The poet has no self. It is very thing or nothing, it enjoys light and shade, it lives in gusto, be if it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated.”

 

For Keats, necessary quality of poetry is a submission to the things as they are, without any effort to intellectualize them into something else. Keats and nightingale are merged into one. It is Keats soul that sings in the bird. He was wholly in the place, in the time and with the thing of which he wrote. He was fully thrilled by the beauty of autumn;

 

“Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—"

 

In order to submit to the things as they are, one must grasp nature so vividly that only those associations and qualities should remain intact that are relevant to the central conception. It will give birth to truth and beauty. The art which is free of irrelevant becomes a thing off beauty which gives joy forever.

 

Keats’ negative capability is the reflection of Hazlitt’s essay ‘On Gusto’ in which he remarks;

 

“It struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, I mean ‘Negative Capability’.”

 

In the third stanza of ‘Ode on Grecian Urn’, Keats’ negative capability is very obvious. He says;

 

“Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed,

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu.”

 

Now the happiness resides not in the self rather in the object into which the self has transported. The poet has destroyed his identity and we can see a fellowship between the poet and the essence of life depicted on the urn.

 

In ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, the poet has acquired a full imaginative participation in the untroubled life of the nightingale. For a moment, he loses his personal identification and has entered the very soul of the bird;

 

“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet.”

 

‘Ode to Autumn’ is the record of such an experience where Keats feels sorrow and happiness at the same time. He feels sorrow for the deterioration of nature by the arrival of autumn but, soon he becomes happy when the idea sparks in his mind that after Autumn, Spring is inevitable.

 

“The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft,

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”

 

Sometimes, Keats is assumed to be an escapist. According to Stopford Brook;

 

“Keats was so pre-occupied with beauty that he turned a blind eye to the actualities of life around him.”

 

But the fact is that he was not an escapist. He was a pure poet who expressed the most worthwhile part of himself in his poetry.

 

In a nutshell, we may say that Keats’ negative capability proved to be very helpful in the composition of poetry. He was a great poet.