Keats and Negative Capability"Negative capability", the term John Keats used only once in a letter to his brothers, is a well-known but surprisingly unexplored concept in literary criticism and aesthetics. This book is the first book-length study of this central concept in seventy years. As well as clarifying the meaning of the term and giving an anatomy of its key components, the book gives a full account of the history of this idea. It traces the narrative of how the phrase first became known and gradually gained currency, and explores its primary sources in earlier writers, principally Shakespeare and William Hazlitt, and its chief Modernist successors, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Meanwhile, the term is also applied to Keats's own poetry, which manifests the evolution of the idea in Keats's poetic practice. Many of the comparative readings of the relevant texts, including King Lear, illuminate the interconnections between these major writers. The book is an original and significant piece of scholarship on this celebrated concept. |
Contents
Genealogy of Negative Capability | |
King Lear and Negative Capability | |
Negative Capability and Keatss Poetry | |
Modernist Heritage of Negative Capability | |
The Tradition of Negative Capability | |
Notes | |
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Common terms and phrases
abstract achieved aesthetic agony Apollo artistic Beauty & Truth becomes bird Byron camelion poet catastrophe character Coleridge consequitive contemporaries Cordelia criticism death disagreeables disinterestedness dramatic egotism Eliot emotional Endymion essay expressed Fall of Hyperion feel Figure Fool Four Quartets genius Gloucester Goneril Grecian urn gusto happy Hazlitt heart human experience Hyperion idea identity imagination intellectual intensity John Keats Keats wrote Keats’s letters Keats’s markings Keats’s poetry Keatsian King Lear Lamia Lear’s markings in King Milton moral mysteries nature negative capability negative capability letter negatively capable mind nightingale Ode on Indolence Ode to Psyche one’s opening pain paradox passion philosophy play poem poet’s poetic re-reading Regan reveals Romantic scene sense Shakespeare Shelley sonnet soul soul-making speech suffering swan symbol sympathy T. S. Eliot term thing thou thought tradition tragedy tragic turn vision W. B. Yeats West’s Wordsworth writes Yeats