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Keats contends:
The excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate,
from their being in close relationship with beauty & truth [. . .] I mean Negative Capability,
that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact & reason [. . .] with a great poet the sense of Beauty
overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
[letter from Keats to his brother George on 21, 27 (?) December 1817]
Keats' theory of "negative capability" is concerned with a particular state
of poetic receptivity that makes literary creation possible. According to Al
Provinziano, it "concentrates on capturing the intensity of emotion and
communicating this feeling via the imagination. This involves a key
action: the poet must throw himself into an object in order to obliterate
his personal identity. [. . .] The purpose of this is to fuse emotional
intensity with the object so that the object becomes symbolic of the
emotions." This complete fusion of poet and thing is so intense that all
"disagreeables," all associations that are not particularly relevant to the
poet’s key insight, are displaced. As a result, the beauty and the truth
that are present there are a union of the perceived object and the poet’s
emotions. This is especially important to Keats because it removes the
need to establish a kind of scientific certainty; instead, the poet (and
audience) revel in the mystery, the undefined ambiguities. It represents
an openness to experience.
Keats' theory breaks down as the following:
For Keats, then, the urn in "Ode to a Grecian Urn," is an object that speaks a truth and a
beauty, but that truth and beauty are understood by the negative capability of the artist.
The urn's message is one that is finally open-ended and mysterious.
"All manner of thing shall be well/ When the tongues of flame are in-folded/ Into the crowned
knot of fire/ And the fire and the rose are one." -- T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding