Research Article KEATS's DEFINITION of NEGATIVE

Available Online at http://www.recentscientific.com International Journal of CODEN: IJRSFP (USA) Recent Scientific

International Journal of Recent Scientific Research Research Vol. 11, Issue, 10 (B), pp. 39825-39834, October 2020 ISSN: 0976-3031 DOI: 10.24327/IJRSR Research Article

KEATS’S DEFINITION OF NEGATIVE CAPABILITY

Dr. Poonam Sinha

Ph.D. (English) PG Diploma Mass Communication, IIMC, New Delhi

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.24327/ijrsr.2020.1110.5572

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Exploring and studying John Keats’ theory – art is equally beautiful without imposing personal Article History: elements into it, in a way, getting oneself into the character one portrays, other than making oneself Received 6th July, 2020 a character- is to learn about the creative passivity as a receptivity towards knowable mystery. Received in revised form 15th Indeed, Keats is the most mystical of the Romantic poets in terms of valuing positively the self- August,, 2020 affirming emptiness necessary to Gnostic insight Accepted 12th September, 2020 Published online 28th October, 2020 Article History This Article is a part of the Research entitled, “Keatsean Negative Capability as a Theoretical Tool for Modern Poetry in English. A Critical Study of T.S. Eliot’s Poerty.” Key Words:

Conflict, Egotistical sublime, Negative Capability, Passivity, Psychoanalytic

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properly cited.

INTRODUCTION remaining content with half knowledge.” Elsewhere, speaking of the “poetical character” in general, Keats observes that “it John Keats is one of the young romantic poets who has shown has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be the excellence in English poetry, which few poets have it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—it possessed. Negative Capability is one of the striking features of has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What Keats’s poetry, his phrase for a power of sympathy and a shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon Poet.” freedom from self-consciousness. It occurs in a letter of 22 1 A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because December 1818 that tends to be a special (or at least a he has no identity—he is continually in, for, and filling some heightened) characteristic of artists. For him, negative other body. The poet is like a chameleon. He assumes like the capability was a capability “When a man is capable of being in chameleon various colours. He has no identity. He is uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching continually filling some other body. He enjoys with equal relish out after fact and reason.” There is a quality that goes “to form pain and pleasure. The poet accepts the whole of life. He a Man of Achievement especially in literature and which identifies himself with the object he is treating. The poet Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative merges himself in the very subject. The two become one and Capability, that is when man is capable of being in the result is the sweet wholesomeness. uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This description can be compared to a In order that one is able to create true poetry, one has to be able definition of conflict: ‘An emotional state characterized by to remain in what may be states of conflict indecision, restlessness, uncertainty and tension resulting from without ‘irritably’ reaching after facts or reasons. By not incompatible inner needs or drives of comparable intensity.’2 imposing one’s self upon the doubts and uncertainties which make up a conflict, Keats would rather make us believe that we These two definitions are very similar; the meaning of conflict were open to the Imagination. The word ‘doubt’ originates sounds very negative and hopeless. However, Keats’s creative from the Latin, ‘dubitare’ and comes from ‘two’ as in two concept seems positive and full of potential by leaving minds. In most conflicts, two people (i.e. two minds) oppose out ‘restlessness’ by avoiding an ‘irritable reaching after fact each other. Yet instead of fighting the other, Keats finds the and reason.’ The quality has to do as well with a capability “of situation to be one that is open for creativity.

*Corresponding author: Dr. Poonam Sinha Ph.D. (English) PG Diploma Mass Communication, IIMC, New Delhi International Journal of Recent Scientific Research Vol. 11, Issue, 10 (B), pp. 39825-39834, October 2020

Shakespeare had no character of his own. He always identified In this sense, Negative Capability is a sublime expression of himself with his characters. He was Hamlet, Macbeth, Iago, supreme empathy. And empathy is the capacity for Portia, Desdemona, Falstaff, and yet he was none of them. He participating in, experiencing and understanding another’s was Shakespeare. feelings or ideas. It’s a creative tool to help us understand each other, understand different points of views or different cultures Keats was the true disciple of Shakespeare. He was capable of so that we might be able to express them. Being able to see entering wholly into the very being of his creations. His friends things from another’s point of view, and to apply an open, remarked how he could understand events far outside himself imaginative creativity, are both critical, poetical methods to as if he had become the bird. Another time he spoke about a resolve conflicts involved in creativity. fall of rain in such a way that he seemed, somehow magically, to know just how a plant must feel with the rain on it. Keats found a clue for many of these speculations in the writings of Hazlitt—particularly the essays, “On Gusto” and According to Keats, the state of negative capability requires an “On Imitation” and the lecture “On Shakespeare and Milton.” ability to experience sensation passively and observe astutely, The character of the artist therein is said to be so absorbed in both qualities necessary to taking on any disciplinary role. the act of creation that it subsists only inside the act. In the Keats’s earlier letters long for an uninhibited life of sensation: process of imagining, all the self-regarding data of ordinary life “However it may be, O for a life of sensation rather than of seem to vanish. Thus, the artist’s curious attentiveness to other thoughts! It is a ‘Vision in the form of Youth,’ a shadow of persons and things, like that of the chameleon or the reality to come,”3 he writes to his friend, Benjamin Bailey. ventriloquist, may outwardly resemble the selflessness of one Although Keats cannot actually live subject to the whims of who has no character. The work of art, in turn, elicits our sensation, without any “irritable reaching after truth,” he longs attention in a way that requires the giving up of ordinary selfish for such a state: the state of negative capability. As Alan and social concerns. It leaves in suspense our usual interest in Richardson has argued, the word “sensation” had correlates in moral judgement for the sake of a new interest in beauty and Keats’s medical training, where it implied a connection—not truth. necessarily an emotional one—between the brain and the “organs of the senses.” Connecting sensory input to the brain, Keats found this quality at its fullest in Shakespeare. He was an sensation is that which allows the poet, like the students in the admirer of Shakespeare, and his reading of the Bard is anatomy theatre, to observe life impartially. In a letter to Mary insightful and intriguing, illustrating the genius of Ann Jeffrey, for example, Keats considers the possibility of Shakespeare’s creativity. Keats describes this genius signing up to work on a merchant ship. To her implied as ‘Negative Capability’. It was primarily under the influence objection that such an occupation would not befit a poet, he of Shakespeare’s negative capability that Keats came to adopt writes: this form of verse for the later period of his literary career. He wanted to attain that perfection in negative capability, which “You are a little in the wrong concerning its destroying the Shakespeare had achieved in his dramas, but Keats found that energies of Mind: on the contrary it would be the finest thing in instead of drama, the ode form of verse was best suited to his the world to strengthen them—To be thrown among people purposes. Negative Capability is aimed at a rich comprehension who care not for you, with whom you have no sympathies, of experience, largeness and compassion; not the egotistic self- forces the Mind upon its own resources, and leaves it free to assertion, but the negation of self which characterized make its speculations of the differences of human character and Shakespeare. It is a capacity for objectivity in the midst of to class them with the calmness of a Botanist.”4 terrible personal suffering, and the capacity to come to terms Without the distractions of sympathy, the mind can work more with this misery, not through fact and reason, but through an scientifically, assessing the “differences of human character” understanding of its true nature. necessary for the writing of good poetry, “with the calmness of In yet another letter addressed to Bailey, Keats throws some a Botanist,” instead of having sympathy for—feeling the light on the nature of Negative Capability—“Men of genius are emotions of—his shipmates. Keats’s scientific metaphor points great as certain ethereal chemicals operating on the mass of to his professionalism, his willingness to detach himself from neutral intellect….they have not any individuality, any people who “care for [him]” better to understand human nature. determined character.” Keats is again thinking of Shakespeare. His observations of people and his revealing comparison with What Keats means is that poets should not impose their own Botany imply an interest in gathering data and then drawing ego and petty private worlds on to their readers. They are conclusions: in empirically assessing the world around him. catalysts who create a reaction between poetry and reader, but Goellnicht, following this line of thought, has argued that, for who themselves remain unobtrusive. Keats, poetic creativity is “ultimately rooted in material existence, in sensations perceived from concrete objects.” Only “Negative Capability means the capability of negating oneself.” after classifying and documenting these “sensations,” the This can be possible only when the character of the poet is not “concrete objects” he observes, can a poet proceed towards confirmed, when he has no ego and no philosophy. Browning negative capability. and Hardy who are respectively confirmed optimist and pessimist cannot have Negative Capability. The character of the Keats is a unique phenomenon in more ways than one, but in poet should be flexible rather than confirmed. He should be a nothing so much as in the rapid maturing of his powers. Dying thoroughfare—open to all sorts of experience. He should at twenty-six, he has left behind a rich body of poetry which possess the capacity of annihilating himself and merging merits comparison with the best of Shakespeare. It should also himself completely, for the time being, into the object of be added that his letters show a growing awareness of life and treatment. The object and subject should be identified. its problems and had he lived longer, his poetry would have 39826 | P a g e Dr. Poonam Sinha., Keats’s Definition of Negative Capability shown greater concern for the life of his fellowmen. His faults, fine imaginative or domestic passages, are we to be bullied into in short, are the faults of immaturity. Keats is truly ‘a a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an poets’ poet,’ who has influenced profoundly Tennyson, the Pre- egotist….We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon Raphaelites and a host of other poets. us.”6 Argument and dialectic seem to him an offensive self- assertion. “Man should not dispute or assert, but whisper results Keats is the greatest writer of Odes in English literature. His to his neighbour.”7 He distinguishes the poetical character to Odes are the finest fruits of his maturity. They represent Keats which he belongs from the “Wordsworthian or egotistical at his best. All the characteristic qualities of his poetry find full sublime”: its essence is that and vivid expression in them. As has been well said, Shelley’s genius finds perfect expression in the lyrics, Keats’s genius in “it has no self—it is everything and nothing—It has no the Odes. character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—It has as The Odes represent at their best the poet’s sensuous enjoyment much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks of Beauty—beauty of art, of nature, and of the ancient world of the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon Poet.” the Hellas. It was Beauty, and Beauty alone, which inspired him and made him create. For Keats, the necessary precondition of poetry is submission to things as they are, without trying to intellectualize them into The Odes, thus, represent Keats’s realism—his calm something else, submission to people as they are, without acceptance of the fact of suffering. Both joy and sorrow are the trying to indoctrinate or improve them. (We meet all this again, realities of life and so the poet must be equally at home in both developed into a whole poetical creed, in Yeats’s early essays.) of them. In other words, in them the poet achieves “Negative Keats found this quality at its fullest in Shakespeare. Capability,” that imaginative sympathy, that perfect mood of self-effacement in which the poet views with equal calm both “It struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, good and evil, sorrow and suffering. especially in literature—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, Again and again the poet tries to escape from the disagreeable doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” world of reality into the beautiful land of romance, but always he realises the futility of such attempts. In The Grecian Urn he This way of feeling grows naturally into a strong active and escapes imaginatively into the world of art but cannot forget dramatic tendency, a wish to participate in the life of others, reality for long. In the Ode to Autumn also the poet asks, and an understanding of other people evident in the letters: “Where are the songs of spring?” However, he concludes, we Often Keats feels that this participation in the life of others, must accept reality as it is and accept such music as autumn “the agony and strife of human hearts”, ought to be the has. We must take beauty with ugliness, joy with sorrow, the mainspring of his poetry. But it is not. The dealings with ideal with the real, as all attempts at escape from the hard facts character and emotion are not the most memorable things in of life are bound to result in disillusionment. Keats’s poetry. There are natures whose passion for life includes, but goes beyond, personality. D. H. Lawrence was The Odes are perfect specimens of Keats’s artistry. His love of perhaps one of these, and there is something of it in Keats. The fine phrases, his habit of loading every rift of his subject with total impression of the moment, the fusion of his own ore, his power of word-painting, his use of suggestive, subjective emotion with sensations from the outside world is sensuous epithets, his music and melody, in short, every aspect the ultimate reality for him; and the most typical and individual of his art finds a rich and full expression in the odes. Their remarks in the letters seem to be in passages like the following: workmanship is flawless, the development of thought logical, and the language clear and well-chiselled. However, all this “I scarcely remember counting upon any Happiness—I look exquisite art of the odes is not the result of conscious artistry; it not for it if it be not in the present hour—nothing startles me came spontaneously to the poet, for the ode-form was the most beyond the Moment. The setting sun will always set me to natural expression of his genius. rights—or if a sparrow comes before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.”8 So far, the most living thing in Keats’s poetry has been the creation of sensuous beauty, first as a source of delight for its Such a nature is not likely to find its best expression in a own sake, then as a symbol of the life of the mind and the narrative of character and events, (or, as Keats hoped, in emotions. Speculative and philosophical interests always drama). It is at its height in moments of impassioned formed the major part of Shelley’s experience, and the young contemplation, when the life of the spirit is closely bound up Wordsworth for a time was hag-ridden by them: there is almost with the objects of immediate sensuous experience. It was in no trace of these in Keats. The academic education which he some such mood that the Ode on Indolence was written. It is never had tends to foster abstract thought; but Keats would the first of the great Odes, written in March 1819; and all of never have lived by it whatever his training. He not only cared them were written in this year. In the Ode on Indolence not little for, but positively resented intellectual truths which make Love, nor Ambition, nor Poetry makes it worth while to give up demands upon the mind without being verifiable in immediate the luxurious enjoyment of the moment: none of them is experience. “Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses. We read fine things, but never feel so sweet as drowsy noons them to the full till we have gone the same steps as the And evenings steep’d in honied indolence; author”.5 Keats almost hates a writer who tries to force the O, for an age so sheltered from annoy, world and the reader to accept his own conclusions, and at That I may never know how change the moons, times he felt that Wordsworth did so. “For the sake of a few Or hear the voice of busy common-sense!

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Fluttering among the faint Olympians Lines which might have served Matthew Arnold as the text for I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspired. his sermon on Keats, the relaxed and sensuous man. So the last stanza with its promise to “But what shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the be thy priest, and build a fane chameleon Poet.” In some untrodden region of my mind, My soul had been a lawn besprinkled o’er With flowers, and stirring shades, and baffled beams: with its lovely, half-inspired, half-natural imagery, is not The morn was clouded, but no shower fell, merely a piece of fanciful devotion to an obsolete myth; but a Tho’ in her lids hung the sweet tears of May; recognition by Keats that his own exploration is to be of the The open casement pressed a new-leaved vine, interior landscape, that his ultimate devotion is to be neither to Let in the budding warmth and throstle’s lay; the objective world, nor to any power outside himself.

It is all exquisite and all utterly transitory; and out of the Indolence records a moment when sensuous happiness is knowledge of this is born a longing for a world in which such complete and sufficient and its own justification. The trouble moments could become eternal. All the Odes deal with this with such experiences, as the poem implicitly recognizes, is theme of transience and permanency. Yeats, on the same that they are only momentary. To Keats, with his appetite for theme, wrote simply the immediately experienced, they are the most real and

important things in life. “We become intoxicated with the light Man is in love, and loves what vanishes, and the atmosphere” of such moments: but among the effects What is there more to say? they give rise to is that “of convincing one’s nerves that the

world is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and Keats is not capable of this sort of twentieth-century stoicism; Oppression”. At the time he wrote the Ode to a Nightingale, he must attempt to reconcile the contradiction. Perhaps this is Keats needed little reminding of this. It was only a few months one of the differences between classical and romantic poetry. It after the death of his brother Tom from a painful and is the classical poet who accepts with resignation the passing of distressing illness, and the memory of this is in the third stanza. earthly joys and is, therefore, free to gather his rosebuds while The poem is not, as is sometimes said, a contrast between his he may (Yeats is writing above in an untypically neo-classic own despondency and the happiness of the bird. It is about the moment); the romantic poet tries desperately to find some contrast between his own immediately experienced happiness permanent and unchanging refuge in a world of flux, longing in the bird’s song, his imaginative participation in an for an age in which he may never know the moon’s changes, or untroubled natural life, and a less immediate but more enduring for a shadowy isle of bliss where he can forget the beating of knowledge of sorrow. Happiness is momentary and transient: the steely sea. Thus for the romantic there is always the the only thing certain is element of conflict, either in the poetry itself or just outside it; and since he is asking questions to which there is no answer, he The weariness, the fever and the fret is little likely to reach a serene conclusion. The best he can do Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; is to find a way of facing a contradiction whose intensity he Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, refuses to minimize; and this is better than saying you don’t Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies, believe in ghosts while there is one breathing down your neck. Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs. The Ode to Psyche seems the farthest away from all this, the most purely fanciful. It would be easy to take it as a piece of The heart-ache and the drowsy numbness of the opening lines lovely decorative mythology: but it is probably something do not describe mere dejection, but a sort of drugged state, more. Psyche is the soul, not recognized as a goddess in the which can only be maintained by further intoxication (Stanza classical Greek mythology. But neither is she the soul in the 2). Wine is the traditional soother of men’s cares, the Christian sense. The absence of any specifically Christian traditional means of prolonging a drowsy sensuous enjoyment; feeling, indeed of any kind of orientation to Christianity, is and Keats sometimes said he enjoyed claret. Though he had his remarkable in Keats. His main religious feeling is a longing, Anacreontic intervals, they are no real answer for him, and in perfectly expressed in the fourth stanza of this ode, for the the fourth stanza he realizes that the only way of escaping to natural piety of antiquity share the happiness of the bird is “on the viewless wings of Poesy”. Poetry means first of all imagination—imaginative When holy were the haunted forest boughs, participation in the bird’s life: secondly, it means the actual Holy the air, the water and the fire. poetry he is writing—the incantatory loveliness of the fourth and fifth stanzas does make this moment permanent, in a sense: Yet Keats still makes the practical distinction between what is but not in the sense that Keats the living and suffering human believed and what is merely imagined, and is quite unable to being really desires. The only way in which it can really be attempt to believe in nature-spirits of Olympus’ faded made eternal is to die at the moment of greatest sensuous hierarchy. Psyche, the last addition to the ancient pantheon, happiness. “I have been half in love with easeful death.” Much never formally worshipped in the ancient world, is the only one ink has been spilt on the romantic poets’ pursuit of death. of the old deities who is still real. “Keats’s longing for death and his mother has become a by-

word among the learned” (W. Empson). Maybe it has; but like Yet even in these days so far retired the Freudian death-wish which has also become a by-word, it From happy pieties, thy lucent fans 39828 | P a g e Dr. Poonam Sinha., Keats’s Definition of Negative Capability does not mean what is most obvious on the surface. The poetic casuistry. But this time it is directed to a different end. Freudian death-wish is the desire of the cell to resist the The poet’s momentary emotional state enters less into the encroachments of outside experience, to remain enclosed in its poem. He is concerned to establish at least one enduring value own kind of contentment. So, the romantic poet’s desire for below the sphere of the moon, and he finds it in the existence death is not a longing for extinction, it is the desire to make a of the beauty of art. It is the only way in which human feeling happiness that he knows to be transient last for ever. And Keats and natural loveliness can be given lasting significance. The is only half in love with easeful-death—the other half of his happy boughs that cannot shed their leaves and the lover who consciousness knows well enough that this answer is only the can never kiss, but whose love can never fade, are types of the negation of any possible answer. But art offers a type of only earthly paradise that exists; and the fact that it is not quite permanence; and by a startling transformation in the seventh of the kind that men are looking for is not now in the stanza the nightingale becomes a symbol of the artist and its foreground of consciousness. song a symbol of art. The last two lines of the poem have been much discussed. That It has often been said that this is an audacious paradox, that the beauty is truth, truth beauty, is not all that we know on earth, nightingale, so far from being immortal, has a considerably and certainly not all that we need to know. In the days when it shorter life than man, and that its song is only immortal in the was the custom to take romantic modes of expression simply at sense that through history there have always been their face value these lines were often read as the expression of nightingales’ songs and that they have always had the same a profound philosophy. Dr. Richards has taught his disciples to power of enchantment. But it is only in this sense that laugh at this reading of them that the statement is conceptually immortality can be predicated of poets; in fact, the poet’s meaningless and is only there for its value in communicating position is stronger, for his individual song endures. There is, and organizing emotion. Neither of these views is particularly therefore, no breach in the poetic logic. But the argument is a helpful. The lines must be read in their context, and in the casuistry none the less, because the special case of poetic context of the other odes. They are of course in the first place immortality is used, or is on the point of being used, as if it the expression of a moment of rapturous recognition of a offered the kind of enduring happiness that Keats seeks as a beautiful object, and so far are equivalent to an exclamation of man. But it does not, and cannot do so. (It is small consolation joy and reverence. But the sensuous resources of Keats’s verse to the sorrows of Eohippus, as T.H. Huxley once remarked, that are so rich that he has no need to disguise his emotions of this one of his remote descendants is some day to win the Derby.) kind as philosophical statements, unless he also means them in So, the last word of the seventh stanza, “forlorn”, recalls Keats some sense to be so. And he says the same thing in prose: “I the poet who creates, foreseeing no poetic immortality to Keats never can feel certain of any truth, but from a clear perception the man who suffers, foreseeing only sickness and sorrow and of its Beauty”. In this context, where transience and an early death. The song of the nightingale fades, and Keats permanence are the two poles of the argument, “truth” means “that finishes where, unlike Shelley, he generally finishes, with his which has lasting value”. (The truth is great and shall prevail. What is true all the feet on the ground. On the level of ordinary human experience, week is “truer” than what is true only on Monday morning.) Keats is there is no solution to the conflict. The poet who creates can saying that beauty is “truer” than love, pleasure and other forms offer little consolation to the man who suffers: but on the level of value, because they pass away while beauty can be of poetic creation the conflict disappears. Transitory human embodied in a lasting quasi-permanent form. When poets say happiness is given permanence in a different sense by being “ye” they are often addressing themselves or other poets. That embodied in art. beauty is truth and truth beauty is all that the artist, as artist, knows, and all he needs to know for the practice of his art. The Ode on a Grecian Urn takes up the thought of the seventh stanza of the Ode to a Nightingale. De Selincourt suggests as its Tout passé: l’art robuste motto a phrase of Leonardo’s: Cosa bella mortal passa e d’arte— Seule a l’eternite. Mortal beauties pass away, but not those of art. It is a much Again, Keats finds a solution to his conflict valid for the artist, more objective and descriptive poem than the Nightingale. It is but leaving the suffering and experiencing man exactly where too often forgotten that Keats’s imaginative glimpse of Greece he was. was derived not only from translated literary sources, but also from actual Greek plastic art, and that he had had more chance In the Ode on Melancholy and the Ode to Autumn, the of experiencing it at first hand than earlier and more learned problems of the artist are in abeyance, and Keats returns to neo-classical connoisseurs; for the Elgin marbles had been ordinary human experience, to the problem of happiness in life. recently acquired by the British Museum, and Keats had been The Ode on Melancholy recognizes that sadness is the profoundly impressed by them. Indeed the imagery of the ode inevitable complement of the moments of intense sensuous seems to have been suggested more by these sculptures than by happiness that so far have been the peaks of his experience. any individual vase-painting. The urn is taken as a type of She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die, enduring beauty; and again the immortality of art is only a And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips, quasi-immortality; for though ceramics last longer than most Bidding adieu. things they are not in any metaphysical sense more indestructible than human clay. There is no real analogy It is therefore as vain to attempt to escape from this inevitable between the loves and pastoral felicities on the urn and pain as to expect light not to cast shadows. Melancholy springs “breathing human passion”; the contrast between the from the transience of joy, and the transience of joy is a part of permanence of the one and the transience of the other is another its nature. But the note of the poem is not that of Carpe diem,

39829 | P a g e International Journal of Recent Scientific Research Vol. 11, Issue, 10 (B), pp. 39825-39834, October 2020 or Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. They suggest an eager grasping at about them. This does not necessarily mean that he had the pleasures that are soon to be snatched away. The whole movement and dramatic gift: indeed, his knowledge of human character and vocabulary of the Odes suggest a rich, slow brooding over actions had hardly gone far enough for this to be possible. beauty and joy, with a full realization both of beauty and the Sensuous beauty and meditation on sensuous beauty was the pain that its disappearance will bring, but with an enjoyment of central experience of his life. It is in the Odes that he explores such intensity and depth that it makes the moment eternal, in this most fully, and perhaps for the time exhausts it. It is not quality if not in duration. likely that he would have rested in this phase. Fighting against it all the time was the active and dramatic tendency we have The Ode to Autumn is pre-eminently the record of such an noticed above, the desire to make “the agony and strife of experience. It is in a sense a return to the mood of human hearts” the material of his verse. We could trace his the Ode on Indolence—making the moment sufficient to itself. further movement in this direction in the two versions It is the most perfect in form and detail of the Odes, and also of Hyperion. the most difficult to penetrate below the surface, for it is apparently the most purely objective and descriptive. The John Keats clarifies what he means by the term : the ability to emotion has become completely fused with the object, and be in Mystery, etc. without needing a rational explanation of it expresses itself completely through it. There are no questions (like Coleridge and Wordsworth clung to). It is amazing how and no conflict in the poem: the season of ripeness and few scholars took what John Keats said seriously; instead, fulfilment is seen as though it is quite final. Autumn as a they’d try and complicate, or explain what couldn’t be poetical symbol is commonly the prelude to winter. Keats sees explained: truth, beauty, the holiness of heart’s affections, it as a still pause in time, when everything has reached fruition imagination, love. and ripeness is all. The old question almost raises its head in the last stanza: Keats instinctively lives the transrationality of gnosis, which requires creative passivity as a receptivity towards knowable Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they? mystery. Indeed, Keats is the most mystical of the Romantic Think not of them, thou hast thy music too. poets in terms of valuing positively the self-affirming emptiness necessary to Gnostic insight. In a letter to J.H. But it is immediately stilled, and the poem ends with the quiet Reynolds of February 1818, he writes in a colourfully relapse of consciousness into the soft natural loveliness that metaphoric style: surrounds it. “Now it is more noble to sit like Jove than to fly like It would be idle to try to turn the Odes into great philosophical Mercury—let us not poems. They come to no conclusion and make no synthesis. therefore go hurrying about the collecting honey-bee Keats doesn ot wholly avoid confusion between permanent like, buzzing here value and value permanently accessible to the individual. His and there impatiently from a knowledge of what is to temperament, with its eager love of life, would have been be arrived at: but let satisfied with a speculative solution like Yeats’s belief in us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and reincarnation: but he would surely have dismissed it as too receptive… I was led fantastic: or like that of Mr. Dunne, whose New Immortality, if into these thoughts, my dear Reynolds, by the beauty I have not misunderstood it, suggests that after death a kind of of the morning consciousness persists, that is in permanent possession of its operating on a sense of Idleness ….” 9 (L1:232, 19/2). past experience.

These metaphysics of magicians Here Keats derides the aggregative content of objective And necromantic books are heavenly. knowledge which contrasts with the lived oneness of knowing and being. In the same letter he speaks positively of But theirs was not the kind of speculation to which Keats was the ‘diligent Indolence’ of contemplation, as well as of the prone. Yet the Odes are not merely decorative and descriptive great benefit to humanity achieved through the passive poems, as parts of them appear to be; nor yet poems of existence of great Works. luxurious self-abandonment; nor yet mere manipulations of feeling. The deep conflict from which they spring is both Keats asserts the positive capability of negative knowledge emotional and intellectual; yet they proceed solely by the through an oxymoronic correspondence between dark and light. methods peculiar to poetry, not by the aid of the speculative In the 1818 sonnet, ‘To Homer’, the poet depicts in lines 9 to intelligence. They are in fact supreme examples of Negative 12 the paradox of knowing ignorance in terms of the thematic Capability, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, harmony of mind and Nature as a symbolic union of dark and mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and light: reason”.

Aye on the shores of darkness there is light, Keats found his real medium here, far more than in the And precipices show untrodden green, narrative poems. They are the summit of his achievement, There is a budding morrow in midnight, for Hyperion was only the beginning of a phase that he did not There is a triple sight in blindness keen…. ( Ll 9-12) live to complete. More than any other poet of his age he had the power of externalizing his experience, of finding adequate The Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytic interpretations on the outward symbols for his experiences, instead of merely talking working of the unconscious mind seem to have the essence of 39830 | P a g e Dr. Poonam Sinha., Keats’s Definition of Negative Capability

Negative Capability. The Romantic poet John Keats coined the phrase ‘Negative Capability’ in a letter written to his brothers George and Thomas on 21 December, 1817. In this letter he Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave defined his new concept of writing. What Keats is advocating is Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; a removal of the intellectual self while writing (or reading) Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, poetry: Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”-that is all For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair. Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (Ode on a Grecian Urn, lines 49-50) Throughout this poem, and many others, Keats captures moments, like that of the ‘fair youth’ stooping to kiss his Throughout his poetry and letters Keats proposes the theory beloved, and holds them to prevent change and decay, revelling that beauty is valuable in itself and that it does not need to in that moment of perfection. declare anything for us to know that it is important. That is, In many of Keats’s poems this need to hold a perfect instant beauty does not have to refer to anything beyond itself: leads to an excited tone, an almost excessive use of superlatives

and an atmosphere of crushing, voluptuous intensity as Keats I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s demonstrates the depth of his appreciation for the beautiful and affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination in the act of appreciation creates poems as exquisite as that seizes as beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or which he is admiring. Keats’s Negative Capability is the ability not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love, to bask in the beautiful without questioning either it or his they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty. methods of description. In other words, he loves to take beauty (p.23 ) simple as it is. It is this ability to hold onto a beautiful truth despite the fact Keats believed that great people (especially poets, whom he that it does not fit into an intellectual system that Keats praises considered to almost be on another level to the rest of in Shakespeare. He criticizes Coleridge for letting go ‘by a thin humanity) had the ability to accept that not every thing can be isolated verisimilitude…from being incapable of remaining resolved—being capable of remaining negative on something. content with half knowledge’ where he should realize Keats was a Romantic and believed that truth does not lie in that ‘beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather science and philosophical reasoning, but in art. In art the aim is obliterates all consideration’ (Keats in a letter to his brothers not to find a solution, as in science, but to explore the idea, so [Sunday 21 December, 1817]. accepting that there might not be an answer is important to Keats’s poems are full of contradictions in meaning (‘a drowsy artists. numbness pains’) and emotion (‘both together, sane and mad’) Keats expressed this idea in several of his poems: La belle Dame and he accepts a double nature as a creative insight. sans Merci: A Ballad (1819), Ode to a Nightingale (1819), The Fall of Hyperion: In Ode to a Nightingale it is the apparent (or real) A Dream (1819). contradictions that allow Keats to create the sensual and hedonistic feeling of numbness that allows the reader to Keats and Tennyson personified imminent death. The former experience the half-swooning emotion Keats is trying to was a Romantic and the latter a Victorian poet. Both share capture. Keats would have us experience the emotion of the some commonalty in the sense of poetic theme and style. language and pass over the half-truths in silence, to love a life ‘of sensations rather than of Thoughts!’ (Letter to Benjamin Darkling I listen; and, for many a time Bailey [Saturday 22 November 1817].10 Keats here can be seen I have been half in love with easeful Death, to be extending Kant’s principle that much thought is sublingual by making the meaning of words less important than Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme, their ‘feel’. Since you can very often not find the exact word To take into the air my quiet breath; that you need (showing that much of your thinking occurs Now more than ever seems it rich to die, without language) Keats often deals in the sensations created To cease upon the midnight with no pain. by words rather than meaning. Even if the precise definition of ( John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” 51-56.) words causes contradiction they can still be used together to create the right ambience. Negative Capability asks’ us to allow Now, sometimes in my sorrow shut, the atmosphere of Keats’s poems to surround us without Or breaking into song by fits, picking out individual meanings and inconsistencies. Alone, alone, to where he sits, The Shadow cloaked from head to foot, Whatever the complicated relations between Truth and Beauty and their respective definitions, what matters to Keats are moments of Who keeps the keys of all the creeds, intense feeling that combine ‘thought’ and ‘emotion’ in appreciating beauty. This I wander, often falling lame, explains why much of Keats’s poetry is devoted to catching, and And looking back to whence I came, holding, moments of beauty. Keats addresses this desire Or on to where the pathway leads; directly in Ode on a Grecian Urn (lines 15-20) where he (Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam 23, 1-8.) writes,

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Both John Keats in “Ode to a Nightingale” and Alfred something natural, like a nightingale. Compare this poem with Tennyson in “In Memoriam” portray death as an entity that Wordsworth’s poem based on his contemplation of the follows the author. By placing such a personal face on such a landscape near Tintern Abbey. Of course the poems differ, but distant and inconceivable end, each poet manages to approach what differences one can attribute to the difference in type of his questions and thoughts of death in a more concrete manner. subject. “Ode to a Nightingale” is the second best ode of John For example, Keats calls Death soft names in many a mused Keats. The poem has eight ten line stanzas. It is written in rhyme, and expresses his past appeals for a gentle end. He has iambic pentameter with a rhyme-scheme ababcdecde. been “half in love with easeful Death” (Nightingale). He sees it as an end to the suffering of his life and appreciates it for that. The overall intention of this paper is to explore the nature of It is rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, his this ‘negative capability’, that is, of the particular capacities personification of the concept of death makes it easier to handle which the containment of emotion in organizational work and to express. Tennyson, too, writes of a nearly human death, demands, especially when working from ‘a psychoanalytic his “Shadow cloaked from head to foot.” This persona allows perspective’. Here an attempt is being made to do two things: him, too, to conceptualize the indeterminate ideas associated to “flesh out” the notion of Negative Capability, contrasting it with the end of his life: he approaches this shadow and with Jacob Needleman’s similar idea of ‘soul’; to approach the contemplates death when he sinks deepest into questioning his same issues from the reverse perspective, as it were, by past and future. exploring some of the ways of being which restrict the development of Negative Capability or ‘soul’. Needleman’s Both men, by personifying death in this manner, approach a term for this limiting or blocking dynamic is ‘dispersal’. concern that pervades much of their works and, indeed, much of their lives. Keats finds himself entranced with his imminent For one of his descriptions of the disposition or state of mind end, and in “Ode to a Nightingale” realizes that he could find demanded of the psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion borrowed little better time and spot to pass on than that particular Keats’s evocative phrase ‘Negative Capability’. Keats used the moment. His is not a fickle or random flirt with death, though. term to characterise the key attribute of the great poet, ‘the Man It is a romance born of long hours of contemplation of his of Achievement especially in Literature’. In this state, ‘man is aching need to see beyond the curtain of his life. This capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without contemplation has led him to accept death in its imminence and any irritable reaching after fact and reason’.10 reality; in the poem he has turned to the hope of a fair and gentle passing. Tennyson’s work, though marked by this same In recent years, this notion of Negative Capability has been contemplation, does not come to the same peaceful increasingly invoked in discussions of psychoanalytic conclusions. His picture of death reflects a less Romantic, more approaches to consultancy and management. It tends, however, Victorian, questioning of faith and religion: he can only see the to be presented as if it were unproblematic, or at least self- “Shadow cloaked from head to foot.” This concealment of its explanatory, despite the fact that the letter in which Keats nature disturbs him terribly. Moreover, he comes to its introduced the idea has been described as ‘one of the most contemplation when “falling lame.” He, too, needs to know to puzzling of all his letters’.11 Keats was, after all, only twenty- what end his life is coming to; but he has not found the serenity two years old when, in a phase of intense exploration and of Keats’s soft whispers: he breaks “into song by fits.” Both speculation, he coined the phrase in a sequence of attempts to men need to understand the end towards which their lives are describe the ‘prime essential’ of a poet.12 These included heading. Keats approaches his death with a Romantic serenity; ‘optimistic naturalism’,‘empirical humanism’, ‘scepticism’, Tennyson approaches his with the inner angst of the Victorian ‘pessimism’,‘Wordsworthian humanitarianism’, and, most loss of faith. significantly for this discussion, ‘humility and the capability of submission’ and ‘disinterestedness’.13 Negative Capability As in ‘The Eve of St. Agnes,” John Keats addresses the transience of was, therefore, the final—though also itself provisional— beauty in “Ode on Melancholy.” He speaks of “Joy” that turns to ‘dovetailing’ of concepts in Keats’s emerging view of the poison. Even while it exists, Beauty is an “aching Pleasure,” for nature of the poetic imagination. it is marked by inevitable decline. Negative Capability indicates the capacity to live with Keats lived in a time of philosophical absolutes and high drama ambiguity and paradox, to hold or contain—not just react to— where death was death and life was LIFE, Dickens implies that the pressure to act from one’s own ego impulses or act out, to Beauty need not be lost completely. In his description of an identify with the moods and modes of suffering of the other, in aged Estella, Pip says, “the freshness of her beauty was indeed order ‘to be a voice, a vision; to pass on a message, translating gone, but its indescribable majesty and its indescribable charm it, flawlessly, into another, more easily apprehended tongue.’ remained.” Perhaps, as Dickens watched the nullification of his country at the hands of industrialism, he liked to imagine that By ‘negative capability’ Keats meant the lack of personal something of Beauty might survive even when it was no longer identity, of preconceived certainty, which he believed to mark visible. This is the “indescribable” element of beauty that has all great poets. It was necessary, Keats believed, for the poet to no definition. Even when “Joy” and “Pleasure” are gone, be, above all, open to impressions, sensations or whatever, something subtler might prevail. which means that the chameleon poet is forever changing his/her ideas. “Ode on a Grecian Urn” was first published in Annals of the Fine Arts, a journal interested mainly in painting and sculpture. Keats may have been influenced in his idea of Negative Its subject is another work of art (the urn) rather than Capability by Coleridge’s notion of ‘negative faith’, ‘which 39832 | P a g e Dr. Poonam Sinha., Keats’s Definition of Negative Capability simply permits the images presented to work by their own house or room [the doors and windows]: ‘without their force, without either denial or affirmation of their real existence nothingness they would be nothing’ (Chapter11; trans. Kwok, by the judgment.’ If one can conceive of poet and Palmer and Ramsay, 1993). psychoanalyst as researcher of the human soul ( Grk.= psyche: Bettelheim, 1983:70-78), then Negative Capability might be In analytic terms, the ‘chameleon’ work of the analyst-poet thought of as the researcher’s most finely-tuned involves attention to the ‘negative spaces’ of the patient’s instrument: ‘what is deepest in the human mystery gives way communication. These are brought into view by the physical only before a Negative Capability—which Keats, it would and temporal space of the setting itself, but also-and, of course, appear, did not conceive to be merely an abdication of crucially-by the analyst’s own ‘negative space’, that is, his or intellectual enterprise.’14 Rather like the ‘capacity for toleration her availability to the dynamics of transference and counter of frustration’, to which it may indeed be related, the inborn transference. Bion’s typically uncompromising description of propensity for Negative Capability—a ‘native virtue of (the) the analyst’s negative space-of the nothingness without which mind’(Caldwell, 1972:7)-is likely to vary from person to he or she would be nothing-is that ‘the analyst has to become person. Although it may, therefore, come naturally to us, infinite’ (Bion, 1984: 46). His underlying idea that not- Negative Capability must also be acquired. This is a difficult knowing is the necessary state of mind for learning, is intellectual stance to maintain even in the best of extremely close to Keats: ‘The intense pleasure of not knowing, circumstances. To an active, seeking mind, the existence of or in the more famous expression he coined, of negative mysteries poses a challenge. When those mysteries begin to capability, was the perfect state for creation, since it left the touch a man directly, when they become, as Keats would call imagination completely free to seize Beauty as Truth.’ them, a “burden,” the mind grows increasingly less capable of ignoring them.’ (Ryan, 1976: 157). What links these two thinkers most intimately is their shared emphasis on the search for Truth. For Keats, truth was accessed There is an obvious ‘family resemblance’ between the through the apprehension of Beauty: “Beauty is truth, truth disinterestedness in Keats’s image of the poet and the radical beauty”… ‘all ye need to know’ (Ode on a Grecian Urn); for openness of the analyst- and, perhaps the ‘ psychoanalytically Bion, through the experience of ‘O’ , of emotional reality in the informed’ consultant. Hence, Bion’s use of the concept to present. define the analyst’s state of mind which he also called ‘patience’: ‘Patience should be retained without Thus, Negative Capability describes the capacity to experience “irritable reaching after fact and reason” until a pattern emotion, one’s own and others’, but also to contain it for the evolves’. sake of the work and, by doing so, to earn from and to use emotion to inform our understanding of the work. Thus, Keats’s poet is ‘related’ to the therapist, and indeed to The ‘negativeness’ of this capability does not indicate many other ‘family members’: mother, teacher, priest, negativity, deficiency or insignificance. Instead, it is a measure consultant, manager-anyone, perhaps, whose role involves of the human capacity to contain emotion, the ability to hold responsibility for others. What links them is this disposition of enough to be able to hold something for another as well as for indifference, which Pines (1987: xxiv-xxv) has oneself. In Lost Christianity, Needleman (1990) describes a called ‘aeolian’ after the Aeolian harp: ‘to show how the human capacity very similar to Negative Capability. In an therapist’s mind can be stirred by the communication of the unintended but potentially fruitful link of Freud, Needleman patient, and how, unselfconsciously, the therapist finds himself uses the term ‘soul’ to capture the ultimately indefinable nature responding in depth to the patient’s hidden meanings.’ In a very of the human capacity for containment and growth. similar way, Symons ( 1901) has written of Keats that ‘His own personality seemed to him to matter hardly more than the ‘Soul’ for Needleman and ‘Negative Capability’ for Keats are strings of the lyre; without which, indeed, there would be no developmental categories—but without the linear connotations music audible, but which changed no single note of the music of ‘stage’ or ‘phase’, nor the overtones of static finality that can already existing in an expectant silence.’15 attach to Klein’s ‘positions’, nor the restricted and pre-defined nature of the notion of ‘competencies’ and skills. In everyday language the notion of being ‘capable’ is so positive that to call a capability ‘negative’ jars incongruously In Needleman’s terms—and indeed in many philosophical and as, apparently, a complete contradiction. Hence, the striking religious traditions—‘soul’ does not exist as a fixed quantity impact of the phrase: it clearly means something and has a with predetermined characteristics. Instead, ‘Every soul is, and seductive and suggestive ring to it, but seems, at the same time, becomes, that which she contemplates.’16 Soul is a quality of to cancel itself out. mind and being which must be brought into existence or learned. However, on closer inspection, the basic image turns out to be entirely consistent. The root meaning of ‘capable’, Soul only exists for a moment, as long as it takes for the like ‘capacity’ and ‘capacious’—though Question to appear then to disappear, as, for example, in the not ‘ability’ and ‘able’-is ‘containing ‘ or ‘ spacious’, derived encounter with death between grief and sadness, between shock from the Latin word capax , ‘able to hold much’ ( French, and fear or in the encounter with super satisfaction, between 1999), and the volume of any container is, of course, a measure emptiness and boredom; or in the encounter with life’s of its internal ‘negative’ space. (As the Too Te Ching says of revolutionary disappointments, before free fall turns to self- the hollow space inside a cup or of the ‘empty spaces’ in a pity.

39833 | P a g e How to cite this article:

Shameemrani K.2020, Efficacy of Aedes Aegypti and Culex Quinquefasciatus Against Padina Gymnospora And Racemosa. Int J Recent Sci Res. 11(09), pp. xxxx. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.24327/ijrsr.2020.1109 International Journal of Recent Scientific Research Vol. 11, Issue, 10 (B), pp. 39825-39834, October 2020 *******

‘The Question’ emerges in the encounter with the emotional impact of the moment. To meet ‘the Question’ is to stumble upon or be faced with the stark reality of one’s naked vulnerability at the edge between the known and the unknown or not-yet known of one’s experience (French and Simpson, 1999). It is precisely this encounter which enables the creation 7. John Keats: A Reassessment, Liverpool University or development of soul or Negative Capability. However, the Press, Liverpool (P.P.- 102-122) emotional impact of any such encounter with truth-in-the- 8. W. J. Bate, John Keats, Harvard University Press, moment, especially for members of a society as fully Massachusetts, 1964, (Chapter X) committed to instant gratification as ours, generates an almost 9. N. A. Scott, Jr., Negative Capability: Studies in the unbearable pressure to avoid the experience rather than to stay New Literature and the Religious Situation, Yale with it. Needleman’s term for the patterns of avoidance that we University Press, New Haven, 1969, (P.P.- 7-8) use to keep out the fearful confusion of this encounter 10. A.Symons, British Romantic Poets—The Wellesley is ‘dispersal’: ‘the first dispersal of the soul’.17 Series, Vol. IV, Routledge/Thoemmes Press, London, 1901, (Reprinted-1998), (P.1626) References 11. P. Hadot, Plotinus or Simplicity of Vision, University of Chicago Press, Chicago,1993, (P.22) 1. John Keats, The Letters of John Keats: A 12. Robert French, ‘Negative Capability’, ‘Dispersal’ and Selection, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1970. The Containment of Emotion :Bristol Business School, 2. Keats’s Kingdom University of the West of England. www.alpheratz.f2s.com/negative.capability.htm 3. Graham Hough, The Romantic Poets, Arrow Books Ltd., London, 1970 (P.171) 4. John Keats, The Letters of John Keats: A Selection, Ed. R. Gittings, Oxford UniversityPress, Oxford, 1970. 5. The Romantic Movement: The Oxford Companion to English Literature 6. W. R. Bion, A Memoir of the Future , Karnac Books, London, 1991, (P. 207)

How to cite this article:

Dr. Poonam Sinha.2020, Keats’s Definition of Negative Capability. Int J Recent Sci Res.11(09), pp.39825-39834. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.24327/ijrsr.2020.1110.5571

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