The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms - Ross Murfin 2018

Negative capability

Negative capability: A term coined by English romantic poet John Keats (in a December 21, 1817 letter to his brothers) to describe the capacity to be “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” For Keats, the ability to remain open-minded — to embrace ambiguity and paradox, to avoid the temptation to rationalize all uncertainties, to negate one’s own personality and prejudices — was critical to perceiving reality in its manifold complexity. Indeed, Keats identified negative capability as the “quality [that] went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature.” He asserted that “with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration,” citing Renaissance poet and playwright William Shakespeare as a model of negative capability and criticizing fellow romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge as “incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.” Subsequent critics have built on Keats’s ideas by arguing that writers should maintain aesthetic distance from their subject matter and that artistic form trumps conventional standards of morality and truth.