Discuss and illustrate the notion of

“negative capability” in J. Keats’s odes you

have studied
John Keats belongs to the younger generation of romantic poets. Coming from a
poor family, struggling with poverty and facing various types of misery, he
devoted himself completely on writing one masterpiece after another. Regarding
bad faith in life, his desire was to find beauty in everything that was cruel, by
escaping from reality through his imagination. This concept is called ‘Negative
capability’, and is defined in his letters to his closest family or friends.

In one of the letters he said: “I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is
capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason.”* It means the ability on behalf of the poet to
absorb the identity of others, whether that refers to people or natural objects. He
believed everyone had to experience the bad things in life because that’s the only
way he could get inspiration. This is the reason why, all his works are full of
contradictories which do not ask for a reason to resolve themselves.

His two most famous odes: “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”,
are the greatest achievements in which he perfected the notion of negative
capability. “Ode to a Nightingale” represents “an intense meditation on the
contrast between the painful mortality that defines human existence and the
immortal beauty found in the nightingale’s carefree song.”** Throughout the
poem he uses many phrases and different metaphors to symbolize something he
yearns for. In parts of the poem he indicates that he wishes for immortality and
the ability to escape from the pain by saying that he wants to ‘leave the world
unseen’, he enters into a state of imagination where the nightingale represents
the symbol of freedom and inspiration. After so many tries, he realizes that his
‘fancy’ attempts to enter into the nightingale’s world have been in vain,
nevertheless, his visionary experience helps him grow and become one with the
nature.
Similarly, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, is another example of Negative Capability. It
refers to art by making a comparison between the world of the urn and the
eternity of life. “Throughout this poem, and many others Keats captures moments
like that of the ‘fair youth’ stopping to kiss his beloved and holds them to prevent
change and decay, reveling in that moment of perfection.”*** Keats finds beauty
of the highest level in the forever frozen sights on the Urn, and although the lover
can ‘never, never kiss’ and the streets of the town ‘for evermore will silent be’, he
sees the urn as a world where things will never change, which sums up the
definition of eternity. Keats tries to disclose that neither the beauty of nature nor
the beauty of art can comfort us for the desolation of life.
In conclusion, these two poems are inevitably connected, they represent the
poet’s sadness and his desperate tries to lose himself in the world of no pain and
sufferings. Instead of moaning for his near death, he enjoys while he hears the
birds singing, instead of feeling sad for the frozen time in the Urn, he makes it live
with his words. “Many writers have identified themselves as having 'Negative
Capability', even if they have not always used the phrase. Coleridge speaks in a
letter of November 1819 of 'a sort of transfusion and transmission of my
consciousness to identify myself with the object'.”**** This can be regarded as
the most optimistic and universal theory in the Romantic period, because it allows
us to remain human, even if the whole world is against it.

References:
*”Keats' Kingdom 2004 – 2019” http://www.keatsian.co.uk/negative-capability.php
** The Keats Circle, ed. by H E Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1965), ii, p. 65.
*** Nagar Anupam (2005) “Recritiquing John Keats”, p.272
**** “Keats' Kingdom 2004 – 2019” http://www.keatsian.co.uk/negative-capability.php