John Keats’s Concept of ‘Negative Capability’ Is Needed Now More Than Ever

From The Epoch Times.com (Mar. 8):

When John Keats died 200 years ago, on Feb. 23, 1821, he was just 25 years old. Despite his short life, he’s still considered one of the finest poets in the English language.

Yet in addition to masterpieces such as “Ode to a Nightingale” and “To Autumn,” Keats’s legacy includes a remarkable concept: what he called “negative capability.”

The idea—which centers on suspending judgment about something in order to learn more about it—remains as vital today as when he first wrote about it.

Keats lost most of his family members to an infectious disease, tuberculosis, that would take his own life. In the same way the COVID-19 pandemic turned the worlds of many people upside down, the poet had developed a deep sense of life’s uncertainties.

Keats was born in London in 1795. His father died in a horse-riding accident when Keats was 8 years old, and his mother died of tuberculosis when he was 14. As a teenager, he commenced medical studies, first as an apprentice to a local surgeon and later as a medical student at Guy’s Hospital, where he assisted with surgeries and cared for all kinds of people.

After completing his studies, however, Keats decided to pursue poetry. In 1819, he composed many of his greatest poems, though they didn’t receive widespread acclaim during his lifetime. By 1820, he had contracted tuberculosis and relocated to Rome, where he hoped the warmer climate would help him recover. He ended up dying a year later.

Keats coined the term negative capability in a letter he wrote to his brothers George and Tom in 1817. Inspired by Shakespeare’s work, he describes it as “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Negative here isn’t pejorative. Instead, it implies the ability to resist explaining away what we don’t understand.

Rather than coming to an immediate conclusion about an event, idea, or person, Keats advises resting in doubt and continuing to pay attention and probe in order to understand it more completely. In this, he anticipates the work of Nobel laureate economist Daniel Kahneman, who cautions against the naive view that “what you see is all there is.” [read more]

Appreciating life’s mysteries is what it is all about. You don’t always have to explain the mystery.