Keats’ Negative Capability

Keats believes that a poet has no personality of his own. Just as a dramatist merges his personality into his characters, the poet should also identify himself with what excites his emotions. The dramatist splits his personality into the manifold variety of human life: his imagination embodies itself only in the figures of his imagination. His creations are living because they share his life breath. In the same manner, according to Keats, the poet should be open to every emotion that comes to him from the objects of nature. He should subdue his ego or self in such a manner that he may possess the negative capability of participating in the life of nature. In one of his letters, Keats writes that when he sees a swallow picking up the grass, he wants to be a swallow to feel what it is like to be one.

In ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, he actually transforms into the world of Nightingale and imagines himself on the same branch to experience what it experiences. And when he listens to its song in the darkness of the night, he shares its joy and wants to die.

In ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’, he is wonder-struck to see the forest scene of some festival or sacrifice carved on the Urn. The details of the scene arrest his attention. He shares with the leaves and the human beings the immortality that they enjoy. He finds the young man singing a song that he will sing for eternity. He finds love and beauty captured in a moment of an ecstatic union and makes the moments eternal. This feeling of participation in the eternity of love and beauty as carved on the Grecian urn leads him to exclaim:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all,

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

In ‘Ode to Autumn’, Keats splits his personality into the personified visions of autumn, as it expresses itself in the various activities of Autumn and in the persons engaged in those activities. He finds autumn sitting like a happy farmer amid his heap of corn. Sometimes the season is present in the form of a man fanning the corn to separate from the husk, its ‘hair, soft-lifted by the winnowing wind’.

Keats was a worshipper of beauty, and it was his senses that revealed to him the beauty of things. The beauty of the Universe from the stars of the sky to the flowers of the earth - first struck his senses, and then from the beauty perceptible to the senses, his imagination seized the principle of beauty in all things. It was through his sense-impressions which kindled his imagination that he realized the truth that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’.

It is this capacity for a negative capability that enables the poet to experience at the same time the emotion of melancholy and joy. This is the peculiar quality of Keats’ genius that enabled him to express his feelings most naturally. Keats’ negative capability is precisely a rejection of set philosophies and preconceived systems of nature. According to Keats, the poet should be receptive rather than searching for fact or reason and should not seek absolute knowledge of every truth, mystery, or doubt.