"Negative Capability" in the Odes of John Keats
By Conor Dorn
In a period of just seven months, from March to September 1819, John Keats was at his most productive as a poet. In this brief stretch of time, Keats composed his “Odes” and “The Fall of Hyperion,” soon after leaving his position as an assistant house surgeon at Guy’s Hospital to focus his artistic energies on his poems. The products of this period have proved to be his most enduring contribution to English letters, and within the context of Keats’ oeuvre, are a culmination of his life-long reflections on what distinguishes art that is truly great. Keats’ correspondence from the spring of 1819 provides ample evidence that he was preoccupied with crafting a unique aesthetic theory of poetry that he could claim as his own. In an April 1819 letter to George and Georgina Keats, John wrote just after showing the pair his “Ode to Psyche” for the first time, “I have been endeavoring to discover a better Sonnet Stanza than we have…”(Keats, 238), enclosing his “Incipit Altera Sonneta” a sonnet aimed at emancipating the sonnet form “fetter’d, in spite of pained Loveliness” (line 3), and in a broader sense, separating arbitrary poetic constraints from those that served aesthetic purpose. This letter is significant as evidence that aesthetic concerns were weighing heavily on Keats’ mind as he composed his “Odes,” and one of the theories with which he was undoubtedly preoccupied was that of “Negative Capability.” Within the world of Keats criticism, the phrase “Negative Capability” is wrought with ambiguity. This is due partly to the fact that the phrase only appears once in his correspondence. On 22 December 1817, Keats wrote, “it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—" (line 41). Negative Capability, however, cannot be reduced exclusively to these few sentences. The phrase is a living, breathing aesthetic theory, one that Keats molded and refined throughout his career. The poetry of 1819, the pinnacle of his verse, is the full embodiment of Negative Capability, with Keats himself demonstrating his own Negative Capabilities as a writer, specifically by incorporating themes of polarity and personal disassociation in order to produce art worthy of a “Man of Achievement.”
The first condition of Negative Capability, one which is ubiquitous in the “Odes,” is the ability, as F. Scott Fitzgerald eloquently put it in his essay “The Crack-Up,” “to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats utilizes this idea of polarity wonderfully as he puzzles over the aesthetic implications of art and poetry. His poetic diction, in particular, is a key avenue for exploration of these polarities. In the first stanza, the narrator, meditating on the artistic qualities of the Urn, poses a series of rhetorical questions. “What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape/Of deities, or mortals, or of both” (lines 5-6). Keats then repeats the sentiment, asking “what men or gods are these?” (line 7). This trend continues into the second stanza, where the narrator asserts that “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter” (line 10). In each instance, Keats juxtaposes two diametrically opposing ideals. Deities and mortals, men and gods, melodies heard and melodies unheard, all participate in the theme of polarity. It is more than just mere coincidence that polarity is an intrinsic part of Negative Capability and the diction of “Grecian Urn.” The Ode itself is a meditation on Keats’ own aesthetic and poetic principles, and while pondering the infinite mystery of the Urn as a medium, Keats unearths the paradoxical properties of art, opting to cooperate with and embrace the polarity in a display of Negative Capability.
On a holistic level, there are several metaphors within “Grecian Urn” that continue an exploration of polarity as an aesthetic principle intertwined with Negative Capability. The narrator and the urn, for example, are painted as diametrically opposed opposites, with Keats the artist acting as a mediator between the two. Keats utilizes apostrophe to enunciate this divide. The poem opens with the apostrophe, “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,” not just about the Urn, but directly to the Urn. What follows is Negative Capability in a microcosm, wherein Keats bridges the polar divide between narrator and Urn, only possible through the abilities of an artist of Keats’ stature. The aesthetic experience embarked on by participation in the Urn demands that the observer exist in, embrace even, the same “uncertainties” that Keats referenced in the Negative Capability letter. In the first stanza, the narrator is introduced to the “Sylvan historian,” and painted on its surface are the “leaf-fring’d legend[s]” (line 5) of bygone ages, individuals who, in some sense, exist as polar opposites of the narrator. The narrator, a mortal participant in the material world struggles to understand the “men or gods” of the Urn, who, though inscribed on the material urn, exist somewhere else, perhaps in the realm of intangible ideas, immortal to the passage of time, surviving eternally even when “Old age shall this generation waste” (“Grecian Urn”, 46).
In the second and third stanzas of “Grecian Urn,” the “Sylvan historian” that can “…Express/A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme” (lines 3-4) introduces a piper playing music for a pair of lovers. The two lovers, reminiscent of the pair described in “Ode to Psyche,” share in one another’s immortality, forever in love:
Fair youth/beneath the trees, thou canst not leave/Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss/Though winning near the goal- yet, do not grieve;/She cannot fade, though thou has not thy bliss,/For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” (15-20).
Keats complicates the notion that the figures on the Urn are representative of specific individuals from the days of yore, and in doing so, pierces into the heart of Negative Capability. Even a cursory survey of Keats’ poetry will show that he was incredibly well versed in the classical myths of the Greeks and Romans. Keeping this fact in mind, we might consider whether these two lovers might represent actual lovers from the myths. Orpheus and Eurydice, eternally united in the underworld, or Cupid and Psyche perhaps, might be the pair represented on the Grecian Urn. However, it also might be that the sculptor of the Urn never intended the pair to represent a specific pair of lovers. In the spirit of depicting the Urn as fundamentally separate from the perishable objects of the material world of the narrator, “As doth eternity Cold Pastoral!” (line 45), it seems more likely that the pair are representative of a more universal and archetypal love. Its subject is still the love of legends and myths, but rather than pointing to a specific pair, the sculptor transcends the narrow minded limitations of exactitude. This is Negative Capability at its most potent. Eschewing the essentially useless questions of historical specifics that the lesser mind yearns for, the stuff of “fact and reason,” the sculptor invites the audience into the world of the eternal, signified by the universal truth of Love. The culminating stanza of “Grecian Urn” has the narrator coming to terms with the vast mystery of the urn, hence the absence of rhetorical questions. The narrator succumbs to the infinite mystery, represented by the archetypal figures on the Urn and the immortal nature of art, allowing himself to intimately enjoy the aesthetic beauty of the Urn without “irritable reaching after facts or reason,” or in this context, incessantly questioning after the specifics of the Urn. The final lines of “Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all/ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (lines 49-50) capture the essence of Negative Capability more precisely than anywhere else in the “Odes.” It is a reconciliation of the mysterious polarities, achieved not by grasping after concrete realities, but by capitulating to the impossible complexity of Truth and Beauty and accepting the ambiguity of “all ye need to know” unflinchingly.
A similar tension between the narrator and the subject of the apostrophe can be found in Keats’ “Ode on Indolence.” This poem also features an urn, and the figures that adorn this urn, personifications of Love, Ambition, and Poesy, are noticeably separated from the narrator. In the first stanza, the narrator writes of these shades: “And they were strange to me, as may betide/With vases, to one deep in Phidian lore” (lines 9-10). At play here is the recurring combination of ambiguity and polarity. Not only are the narrator and the subject of the poem set apart, but Keats makes it clear that this distance renders mutual communication and understanding difficult. Difficult, yet not impossible, and Keats seems to be making the implicit argument that it is the job of the artist or poet to bridge the divide. That divide is best illustrated by the recurrence of rhetorical questions. The type of rhetorical questions that characterize the “Odes,” as previously noted, are concerned primarily with the subject matter of the apostrophe. “Ode to Psyche”, for example, has the narrator watching the union of two lovers, deep in bliss, only to ask, “But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?” (line 22). In “Ode on Indolence,” the narrator wonders, “How is it, shadows, that I knew ye not?/How came ye muffled in so hush a masque?” (lines 11-12). And later, “O folly! What is love? And where is it?” (line 32). Likewise, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” has the narrator ponder, “What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?/What mad pursuit?...” (lines 8-9). In all cases, Keats’ seems to be insinuating that the answer to such complex questions can be answered by an artist who is negatively capable, one who can exist among uncertainties and reconcile the diametrically opposed objects.
A second thematic polarity is a juxtaposition between the artificiality of art, in the sense that it is created by man, and the pure and natural art of nature. This juxtaposition can be observed in a comparison between “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The song of the nightingale, art in a musical sense, is nonetheless a natural phenomenon. Because of this fact, the nightingale is free from the world “where men sit and hear each other groan” (line 24). The Urn, on the other hand, an artificial creation by artists from past ages, must “remain, in midst of other woe/Than ours, a friend to man” (lines 47-48). The question then becomes, where does poetry fit in among these polarities? Is poetry the stuff of nature, like the Nightingale’s song, or is it the artificial creation of man, like the Urn? In “Ode to Nightingale,” the answer becomes clear as Keats utilizes Negative Capability to reconciling the disparities. Keats wrote in 1818, a year before the composition of “Nightingale”: “If poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all” (line 66). Keeping this letter in mind, it is reasonable to assume that the Nightingale’s song exists, at least in part, as symbolic of the poetry to which Keats aspired. For Keats, poetry was a synthesis of the artificially created art of man and the natural art created by the Nightingale. It retains the immortality and infinite mystery of the Grecian Urn, but it is a more noble pursuit, separate from the impurity of the material world. In analyzing the juxtaposition between the art mediums of the Urn and the Nightingale, through which Keats arrived at this synthesis, the theory of Negative Capability becomes clearer. Music and poetry are arts without a visual component, and thus free from the representational constraints that accompany visual art. In the spirit of passivity that Keats so passionately believed in, music, or poetry if read aloud, are mediums that can be enjoyed with eyes closed, allowing the sounds to wash over one however they may. No positive action on the part of the observer is needed; just a spirit of receptiveness and passivity, which is exactly the state of being that Negative Capability demands.
Music and poetry therefore are the supreme venue for the experience of Negative Capability. In “The Fall of Hyperion,” written concurrently with the “Odes” of 1819, Apollo’s music is the catalyst for unbounded emotion. “My sense was fill’d/with that new blissful golden melody/A living death was in each gush of sounds…” (lines 279-281). Here, the speaker realizes the latent power of music, and in the next few lines, stumbles upon the polarizing effect of Negative Capability, writing, “With music wing’d instead of silent plums,/To hover round my head, and make me sick/Of joy and grief at once.” (lines 287-289). To be sick of both joy and grief, emotions at the opposite ends of the spectrum, speaks to the inexhaustible capacity of music to foster complexity and paradox. The listener then must resign himself completely to the conflict, allowing joy and grief to exist simultaneously. The experience itself might be uncomfortable, but to accept this discomfort and participate unequivocally in the music is the epitome of Negative Capability.
Polarity and juxtaposition of opposites are vital aspects of the manner in which Keats’ Negative Capability manifests itself in and enhances the “Odes,” but equally important is the way in which Keats uses his capability to navigate the deepest depths of human nature. He does so through a complete detachment from his own individuality, transcending the mental restraints that might hinder less talented poets. In an 1818 letter to George and Georgina Keats, Keats the poet wrote: “I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds” (Keats, 159). A few weeks later, he penned the ‘Cameleon Poet’ letter to Richard Woodhouse, where he expanded upon his doctrine of personal transcendence, writing first as to the "poetical Character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself - it has no self - it is every thing and nothing - It has no character - it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated" (Keats, 147-148).
Again, we see the recurrence of the polarities (light and shade, foul or fair, etc.) that are so vital to Negative Capability, but we also see Keats revealing a desire to extinguish his own individuality, to disassociate from is own self in favor of the universal and the external, only possible if the subject can emancipate himself from the natural instinct to cling to personal concerns. In general, the “Odes” are an experiment in disassociation, and in this area, Keats took inspiration from his contemporaries. Wordsworth, for example, wrote of a certain “wise passiveness” in his 1798 poem “Expostulation and Reply”: “Nor less I deem that there are Powers/Which of themselves our minds impress;/That we can feed this mind of ours/In a wise passiveness” (lines 21-24). Scholars have often equated Wordsworth’s “wise passiveness” with Keats’ Negative Capability, specifically drawing the parallel that both aesthetic theories require the artist to completely relinquish personal worries, allowing the thoughts and conflicts of the external world to replace his own. To be passive is to maintain an open mind, free from the burden of orthodoxy that prevents even the possibility of change, completely averse to clinging to comfortable but ultimately empty certainties that satisfy artists of a lesser pedigree. Keats penned a letter to JH Reynolds in February 1818 in which he noted that a successful artist must himself be passive and receptive (Keats, 80-82), and the “Odes” of the following year can be seen as a continuation of Keats’ mission to practice this radical self-annihilation in the face of his poetic objects. As a collective body of work, “The Odes” accomplish this goal as Keats enters into and participates in the complete otherness of his subject, without reaching for the solidity of his own reason.
“Ode to Psyche” shows Keats’ detachment from the material world and his own personhood: “Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see/The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes?” (lines 5-6). The speaker enters into the mythical land of the divine, understanding his role to “See, and sing, by my own eyes inspired” (line 43), thereby transforming the sublime vision into art which can be appreciated by those not endowed with the capacity for ‘Negative Capability.’ The narrator goes on to describe the role of the poet in greater detail, “Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane/In some untrodden region of my mind,/Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,/Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind” (lines 50-53). In addition to being a paeon to the powers of the imagination, the narrator elaborates on the mission of a poet to interpret the higher mysteries of the universe for his readers. Wordsworth too recognized this sacred duty, noting in his “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads that the poet acts as a translator, “endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature…then is supposed to be common among mankind” (Wordsworth, 103). These sentiments resemble those of Keats, who supposes that it is a poet’s disassociation through Negative Capability that allows him to understand and translate the mysterious and the divine.
In a similar fashion, “Ode to a Nightingale” involves a narrator’s journey of disassociation. “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbess pains/My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,/Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains/One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk” (line 1-4). The speaker, in a state of utter despondency, longs to disassociate himself from his own negative thoughts, thereby freeing himself from the prison of his own mind. He turns to the nightingale, the “light winged dryad of the trees” (line 7), telling the bird “Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,/But being too happy in thine happiness” (lines 5-6). The narrator yearns to take leave of his pain by entering into the bird: “O, for a draught of that vintage!...That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,/And with thee fade away into the forest dim:/Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget…” (lines 11, 19-20). To enter into the nightingale is not to do so psychically, but do so through the imagination through the practice of personal disassociation, participating in the immortality of the Nightingale’s song, which like the Grecian Urn, is not subject to the pain of self-awareness or eroding force of time.
As the “Odes” demonstrate, Negative Capability is first and foremost an aesthetic ideal, but the influences on its inception within Keats’ mind are many, one being the tumultuous political contexts of his life. Keats was born in 1795, six years after the French Revolution, and died in 1821, the same year as Napoleon Bonaparte. These twenty one years encapsulate an era of bitter war, widespread unrest, and swings between polarizing ideologies. It was this very atmosphere that shaped Negative Capability into the aesthetic theory that distanced itself from any sort dogma and the increasingly corrupt material world. In 1817, two years before the “Odes,” the conservative British government, participating in a general trend of reactionary politics sweeping across Europe in the wake of the French Revolution, suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus, citing “a traitorous conspiracy...for the purpose of overthrowing...the established government.” Keats himself made reference to the event in an 1817 review of Edmund Kean in Richard III (Keats, 40-41), so there is little doubt that the political turmoil, affecting him and his close literary associates more so than others, was weighing heavily his mind. In her article “On 1793 and the Aftermath of the French Revolution,” Diane Piccitto elaborates on the common trend seen in British radicals of the late 18th and early 19th century to idealize the French revolution in the early years, only to experience disillusionment during the excesses of Robespierre and the other Jacobins. Piccitto quotes Robert Southey, a contemporary and acquaintance of Keats, in describing this early idealism. “Few persons but those who have lived in it can conceive or comprehend what the memory of the French Revolution was, nor what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it. Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race,” wrote Southey, who, writing in 1824, was painfully aware of the horrors that would befall revolutionary France. In particular, Piccitotto points to writers such as William Blake as “one such British radical whose faith in human action was shaken by the disjunction between 1789 and 1793.” Though she does not mention Keats by name, he too underwent a similar ideological transformation in his growing disapproval of revolutionary excess. In the spirit of Negative Capability, Keats shuns the narrow minded adherence to political ideology, radical or conservative. Dogma is of no use to the artist. Rather, accepting uncertainty and ambiguity, Keats steps away from the fractious political dialogue and remains Negatively Capable, thus able to flourish without the trappings of ideology. It is this same reconciliation of the polar opposites, in this instance with that of liberal and conservative, and the general willingness to accept ambiguity and alienation from the material world, that surface in the “Odes” of 1819 and constitute a central component of Negative Capability.
Bibliography
Fitzgerald, F Scott. “The Crack-Up | Esquire | February 1936.” Esquire | The Complete Archive, classic.esquire.com/the-crack-up/.
“Habeas Corpus Act 1817.” The British Library, The British Library, 27 June 2016, www.bl.uk/collection-items/habeas-corpus-act.
Keats, John: The Complete Poems. Penguin Group, 1988.
Keats, John, and Robert Gittings. Selected Letters of John Keats. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Piccitto, Diane. “On 1793 and the Aftermath of the French Revolution.” BRANCH: Britain,
Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. 27 November 2018
“The Negative Capability StoryMap.” The Keats Letters Project, 28 Dec. 2017, keatslettersproject.com/correspondence/the-negative-capability-storymap/.
Wordsworth, William, and Coleridge, Samuel T. Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1802. Oxford University Press, 2013.
By Conor Dorn
In a period of just seven months, from March to September 1819, John Keats was at his most productive as a poet. In this brief stretch of time, Keats composed his “Odes” and “The Fall of Hyperion,” soon after leaving his position as an assistant house surgeon at Guy’s Hospital to focus his artistic energies on his poems. The products of this period have proved to be his most enduring contribution to English letters, and within the context of Keats’ oeuvre, are a culmination of his life-long reflections on what distinguishes art that is truly great. Keats’ correspondence from the spring of 1819 provides ample evidence that he was preoccupied with crafting a unique aesthetic theory of poetry that he could claim as his own. In an April 1819 letter to George and Georgina Keats, John wrote just after showing the pair his “Ode to Psyche” for the first time, “I have been endeavoring to discover a better Sonnet Stanza than we have…”(Keats, 238), enclosing his “Incipit Altera Sonneta” a sonnet aimed at emancipating the sonnet form “fetter’d, in spite of pained Loveliness” (line 3), and in a broader sense, separating arbitrary poetic constraints from those that served aesthetic purpose. This letter is significant as evidence that aesthetic concerns were weighing heavily on Keats’ mind as he composed his “Odes,” and one of the theories with which he was undoubtedly preoccupied was that of “Negative Capability.” Within the world of Keats criticism, the phrase “Negative Capability” is wrought with ambiguity. This is due partly to the fact that the phrase only appears once in his correspondence. On 22 December 1817, Keats wrote, “it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—" (line 41). Negative Capability, however, cannot be reduced exclusively to these few sentences. The phrase is a living, breathing aesthetic theory, one that Keats molded and refined throughout his career. The poetry of 1819, the pinnacle of his verse, is the full embodiment of Negative Capability, with Keats himself demonstrating his own Negative Capabilities as a writer, specifically by incorporating themes of polarity and personal disassociation in order to produce art worthy of a “Man of Achievement.”
The first condition of Negative Capability, one which is ubiquitous in the “Odes,” is the ability, as F. Scott Fitzgerald eloquently put it in his essay “The Crack-Up,” “to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats utilizes this idea of polarity wonderfully as he puzzles over the aesthetic implications of art and poetry. His poetic diction, in particular, is a key avenue for exploration of these polarities. In the first stanza, the narrator, meditating on the artistic qualities of the Urn, poses a series of rhetorical questions. “What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape/Of deities, or mortals, or of both” (lines 5-6). Keats then repeats the sentiment, asking “what men or gods are these?” (line 7). This trend continues into the second stanza, where the narrator asserts that “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter” (line 10). In each instance, Keats juxtaposes two diametrically opposing ideals. Deities and mortals, men and gods, melodies heard and melodies unheard, all participate in the theme of polarity. It is more than just mere coincidence that polarity is an intrinsic part of Negative Capability and the diction of “Grecian Urn.” The Ode itself is a meditation on Keats’ own aesthetic and poetic principles, and while pondering the infinite mystery of the Urn as a medium, Keats unearths the paradoxical properties of art, opting to cooperate with and embrace the polarity in a display of Negative Capability.
On a holistic level, there are several metaphors within “Grecian Urn” that continue an exploration of polarity as an aesthetic principle intertwined with Negative Capability. The narrator and the urn, for example, are painted as diametrically opposed opposites, with Keats the artist acting as a mediator between the two. Keats utilizes apostrophe to enunciate this divide. The poem opens with the apostrophe, “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,” not just about the Urn, but directly to the Urn. What follows is Negative Capability in a microcosm, wherein Keats bridges the polar divide between narrator and Urn, only possible through the abilities of an artist of Keats’ stature. The aesthetic experience embarked on by participation in the Urn demands that the observer exist in, embrace even, the same “uncertainties” that Keats referenced in the Negative Capability letter. In the first stanza, the narrator is introduced to the “Sylvan historian,” and painted on its surface are the “leaf-fring’d legend[s]” (line 5) of bygone ages, individuals who, in some sense, exist as polar opposites of the narrator. The narrator, a mortal participant in the material world struggles to understand the “men or gods” of the Urn, who, though inscribed on the material urn, exist somewhere else, perhaps in the realm of intangible ideas, immortal to the passage of time, surviving eternally even when “Old age shall this generation waste” (“Grecian Urn”, 46).
In the second and third stanzas of “Grecian Urn,” the “Sylvan historian” that can “…Express/A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme” (lines 3-4) introduces a piper playing music for a pair of lovers. The two lovers, reminiscent of the pair described in “Ode to Psyche,” share in one another’s immortality, forever in love:
Fair youth/beneath the trees, thou canst not leave/Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss/Though winning near the goal- yet, do not grieve;/She cannot fade, though thou has not thy bliss,/For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” (15-20).
Keats complicates the notion that the figures on the Urn are representative of specific individuals from the days of yore, and in doing so, pierces into the heart of Negative Capability. Even a cursory survey of Keats’ poetry will show that he was incredibly well versed in the classical myths of the Greeks and Romans. Keeping this fact in mind, we might consider whether these two lovers might represent actual lovers from the myths. Orpheus and Eurydice, eternally united in the underworld, or Cupid and Psyche perhaps, might be the pair represented on the Grecian Urn. However, it also might be that the sculptor of the Urn never intended the pair to represent a specific pair of lovers. In the spirit of depicting the Urn as fundamentally separate from the perishable objects of the material world of the narrator, “As doth eternity Cold Pastoral!” (line 45), it seems more likely that the pair are representative of a more universal and archetypal love. Its subject is still the love of legends and myths, but rather than pointing to a specific pair, the sculptor transcends the narrow minded limitations of exactitude. This is Negative Capability at its most potent. Eschewing the essentially useless questions of historical specifics that the lesser mind yearns for, the stuff of “fact and reason,” the sculptor invites the audience into the world of the eternal, signified by the universal truth of Love. The culminating stanza of “Grecian Urn” has the narrator coming to terms with the vast mystery of the urn, hence the absence of rhetorical questions. The narrator succumbs to the infinite mystery, represented by the archetypal figures on the Urn and the immortal nature of art, allowing himself to intimately enjoy the aesthetic beauty of the Urn without “irritable reaching after facts or reason,” or in this context, incessantly questioning after the specifics of the Urn. The final lines of “Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all/ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (lines 49-50) capture the essence of Negative Capability more precisely than anywhere else in the “Odes.” It is a reconciliation of the mysterious polarities, achieved not by grasping after concrete realities, but by capitulating to the impossible complexity of Truth and Beauty and accepting the ambiguity of “all ye need to know” unflinchingly.
A similar tension between the narrator and the subject of the apostrophe can be found in Keats’ “Ode on Indolence.” This poem also features an urn, and the figures that adorn this urn, personifications of Love, Ambition, and Poesy, are noticeably separated from the narrator. In the first stanza, the narrator writes of these shades: “And they were strange to me, as may betide/With vases, to one deep in Phidian lore” (lines 9-10). At play here is the recurring combination of ambiguity and polarity. Not only are the narrator and the subject of the poem set apart, but Keats makes it clear that this distance renders mutual communication and understanding difficult. Difficult, yet not impossible, and Keats seems to be making the implicit argument that it is the job of the artist or poet to bridge the divide. That divide is best illustrated by the recurrence of rhetorical questions. The type of rhetorical questions that characterize the “Odes,” as previously noted, are concerned primarily with the subject matter of the apostrophe. “Ode to Psyche”, for example, has the narrator watching the union of two lovers, deep in bliss, only to ask, “But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?” (line 22). In “Ode on Indolence,” the narrator wonders, “How is it, shadows, that I knew ye not?/How came ye muffled in so hush a masque?” (lines 11-12). And later, “O folly! What is love? And where is it?” (line 32). Likewise, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” has the narrator ponder, “What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?/What mad pursuit?...” (lines 8-9). In all cases, Keats’ seems to be insinuating that the answer to such complex questions can be answered by an artist who is negatively capable, one who can exist among uncertainties and reconcile the diametrically opposed objects.
A second thematic polarity is a juxtaposition between the artificiality of art, in the sense that it is created by man, and the pure and natural art of nature. This juxtaposition can be observed in a comparison between “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The song of the nightingale, art in a musical sense, is nonetheless a natural phenomenon. Because of this fact, the nightingale is free from the world “where men sit and hear each other groan” (line 24). The Urn, on the other hand, an artificial creation by artists from past ages, must “remain, in midst of other woe/Than ours, a friend to man” (lines 47-48). The question then becomes, where does poetry fit in among these polarities? Is poetry the stuff of nature, like the Nightingale’s song, or is it the artificial creation of man, like the Urn? In “Ode to Nightingale,” the answer becomes clear as Keats utilizes Negative Capability to reconciling the disparities. Keats wrote in 1818, a year before the composition of “Nightingale”: “If poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all” (line 66). Keeping this letter in mind, it is reasonable to assume that the Nightingale’s song exists, at least in part, as symbolic of the poetry to which Keats aspired. For Keats, poetry was a synthesis of the artificially created art of man and the natural art created by the Nightingale. It retains the immortality and infinite mystery of the Grecian Urn, but it is a more noble pursuit, separate from the impurity of the material world. In analyzing the juxtaposition between the art mediums of the Urn and the Nightingale, through which Keats arrived at this synthesis, the theory of Negative Capability becomes clearer. Music and poetry are arts without a visual component, and thus free from the representational constraints that accompany visual art. In the spirit of passivity that Keats so passionately believed in, music, or poetry if read aloud, are mediums that can be enjoyed with eyes closed, allowing the sounds to wash over one however they may. No positive action on the part of the observer is needed; just a spirit of receptiveness and passivity, which is exactly the state of being that Negative Capability demands.
Music and poetry therefore are the supreme venue for the experience of Negative Capability. In “The Fall of Hyperion,” written concurrently with the “Odes” of 1819, Apollo’s music is the catalyst for unbounded emotion. “My sense was fill’d/with that new blissful golden melody/A living death was in each gush of sounds…” (lines 279-281). Here, the speaker realizes the latent power of music, and in the next few lines, stumbles upon the polarizing effect of Negative Capability, writing, “With music wing’d instead of silent plums,/To hover round my head, and make me sick/Of joy and grief at once.” (lines 287-289). To be sick of both joy and grief, emotions at the opposite ends of the spectrum, speaks to the inexhaustible capacity of music to foster complexity and paradox. The listener then must resign himself completely to the conflict, allowing joy and grief to exist simultaneously. The experience itself might be uncomfortable, but to accept this discomfort and participate unequivocally in the music is the epitome of Negative Capability.
Polarity and juxtaposition of opposites are vital aspects of the manner in which Keats’ Negative Capability manifests itself in and enhances the “Odes,” but equally important is the way in which Keats uses his capability to navigate the deepest depths of human nature. He does so through a complete detachment from his own individuality, transcending the mental restraints that might hinder less talented poets. In an 1818 letter to George and Georgina Keats, Keats the poet wrote: “I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds” (Keats, 159). A few weeks later, he penned the ‘Cameleon Poet’ letter to Richard Woodhouse, where he expanded upon his doctrine of personal transcendence, writing first as to the "poetical Character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself - it has no self - it is every thing and nothing - It has no character - it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated" (Keats, 147-148).
Again, we see the recurrence of the polarities (light and shade, foul or fair, etc.) that are so vital to Negative Capability, but we also see Keats revealing a desire to extinguish his own individuality, to disassociate from is own self in favor of the universal and the external, only possible if the subject can emancipate himself from the natural instinct to cling to personal concerns. In general, the “Odes” are an experiment in disassociation, and in this area, Keats took inspiration from his contemporaries. Wordsworth, for example, wrote of a certain “wise passiveness” in his 1798 poem “Expostulation and Reply”: “Nor less I deem that there are Powers/Which of themselves our minds impress;/That we can feed this mind of ours/In a wise passiveness” (lines 21-24). Scholars have often equated Wordsworth’s “wise passiveness” with Keats’ Negative Capability, specifically drawing the parallel that both aesthetic theories require the artist to completely relinquish personal worries, allowing the thoughts and conflicts of the external world to replace his own. To be passive is to maintain an open mind, free from the burden of orthodoxy that prevents even the possibility of change, completely averse to clinging to comfortable but ultimately empty certainties that satisfy artists of a lesser pedigree. Keats penned a letter to JH Reynolds in February 1818 in which he noted that a successful artist must himself be passive and receptive (Keats, 80-82), and the “Odes” of the following year can be seen as a continuation of Keats’ mission to practice this radical self-annihilation in the face of his poetic objects. As a collective body of work, “The Odes” accomplish this goal as Keats enters into and participates in the complete otherness of his subject, without reaching for the solidity of his own reason.
“Ode to Psyche” shows Keats’ detachment from the material world and his own personhood: “Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see/The winged Psyche with awaken’d eyes?” (lines 5-6). The speaker enters into the mythical land of the divine, understanding his role to “See, and sing, by my own eyes inspired” (line 43), thereby transforming the sublime vision into art which can be appreciated by those not endowed with the capacity for ‘Negative Capability.’ The narrator goes on to describe the role of the poet in greater detail, “Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane/In some untrodden region of my mind,/Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,/Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind” (lines 50-53). In addition to being a paeon to the powers of the imagination, the narrator elaborates on the mission of a poet to interpret the higher mysteries of the universe for his readers. Wordsworth too recognized this sacred duty, noting in his “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads that the poet acts as a translator, “endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature…then is supposed to be common among mankind” (Wordsworth, 103). These sentiments resemble those of Keats, who supposes that it is a poet’s disassociation through Negative Capability that allows him to understand and translate the mysterious and the divine.
In a similar fashion, “Ode to a Nightingale” involves a narrator’s journey of disassociation. “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbess pains/My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,/Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains/One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk” (line 1-4). The speaker, in a state of utter despondency, longs to disassociate himself from his own negative thoughts, thereby freeing himself from the prison of his own mind. He turns to the nightingale, the “light winged dryad of the trees” (line 7), telling the bird “Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,/But being too happy in thine happiness” (lines 5-6). The narrator yearns to take leave of his pain by entering into the bird: “O, for a draught of that vintage!...That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,/And with thee fade away into the forest dim:/Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget…” (lines 11, 19-20). To enter into the nightingale is not to do so psychically, but do so through the imagination through the practice of personal disassociation, participating in the immortality of the Nightingale’s song, which like the Grecian Urn, is not subject to the pain of self-awareness or eroding force of time.
As the “Odes” demonstrate, Negative Capability is first and foremost an aesthetic ideal, but the influences on its inception within Keats’ mind are many, one being the tumultuous political contexts of his life. Keats was born in 1795, six years after the French Revolution, and died in 1821, the same year as Napoleon Bonaparte. These twenty one years encapsulate an era of bitter war, widespread unrest, and swings between polarizing ideologies. It was this very atmosphere that shaped Negative Capability into the aesthetic theory that distanced itself from any sort dogma and the increasingly corrupt material world. In 1817, two years before the “Odes,” the conservative British government, participating in a general trend of reactionary politics sweeping across Europe in the wake of the French Revolution, suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus, citing “a traitorous conspiracy...for the purpose of overthrowing...the established government.” Keats himself made reference to the event in an 1817 review of Edmund Kean in Richard III (Keats, 40-41), so there is little doubt that the political turmoil, affecting him and his close literary associates more so than others, was weighing heavily his mind. In her article “On 1793 and the Aftermath of the French Revolution,” Diane Piccitto elaborates on the common trend seen in British radicals of the late 18th and early 19th century to idealize the French revolution in the early years, only to experience disillusionment during the excesses of Robespierre and the other Jacobins. Piccitto quotes Robert Southey, a contemporary and acquaintance of Keats, in describing this early idealism. “Few persons but those who have lived in it can conceive or comprehend what the memory of the French Revolution was, nor what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it. Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race,” wrote Southey, who, writing in 1824, was painfully aware of the horrors that would befall revolutionary France. In particular, Piccitotto points to writers such as William Blake as “one such British radical whose faith in human action was shaken by the disjunction between 1789 and 1793.” Though she does not mention Keats by name, he too underwent a similar ideological transformation in his growing disapproval of revolutionary excess. In the spirit of Negative Capability, Keats shuns the narrow minded adherence to political ideology, radical or conservative. Dogma is of no use to the artist. Rather, accepting uncertainty and ambiguity, Keats steps away from the fractious political dialogue and remains Negatively Capable, thus able to flourish without the trappings of ideology. It is this same reconciliation of the polar opposites, in this instance with that of liberal and conservative, and the general willingness to accept ambiguity and alienation from the material world, that surface in the “Odes” of 1819 and constitute a central component of Negative Capability.
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