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: -In the concept of negative capability and in the poem exists the possibility that we might, in art at least, remain unbound by our limited human conception of existence-that the nightingale could sing past death and, in so doing, momentarily free the poet from the fact of his mortality.

Detailed explanation-4: -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-5: -Notice the key words in these definitions: negative capability is about uncertainty, mystery, and doubt, as opposed to “fixed” and “enforced” conceptions of the world. Negative capability encourages us to keep an open mind and always consider the possibility that we may be wrong.