ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -What does Keats mean by ‘negative capability’? Clearly, he is using the word ‘negative’ not in a pejorative sense, but to convey the idea that a person’s potential can be defined by what he or she does not possess – in this case a need to be clever, a determination to work everything out.

Detailed explanation-2: -negative capability, a writer’s ability, “which Shakespeare possessed so enormously, ” to accept “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason, ” according to English poet John Keats, who first used the term in an 1817 letter.

Detailed explanation-3: -Keats’ Theory of Negative Capability 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.

Detailed explanation-4: -Keats’s Negative Capability is evident in ‘Ode on Melancholy’, which sees the poet exhorting us to revel in melancholy’s contradictory and complex aspect, rather than seeing it as irredeemably negative, something to be swept aside as an inconvenience.

Detailed explanation-5: -Negative Capability Examples The most prominent references of ‘Negative capability’ are found in Keats’ poem “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode to Autumn” etc. In “Ode to a Nightingale” Keats wants to escape from the real world full of ‘fever’ and ‘fret’ to the magical and ideal world of Nightingale.