The Concept of "Negative Capability" in John Keats's Poetry

In an 1817 letter to his brothers, George and Thomas, John Keats describes a manner of thought that he calls “negative capability.” According to Keats, this is “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” (968) For centuries, the meaning of this concept has been debated--a concept whose oxymoronic name seems to hint at its meaning. To consider “negative capability” with a reliance on rigid logic and precise definitions is to invite perplexity. Keats describes Shakespeare and his friend Samuel Coleridge as being among those gifted with the ability, implying that when released from the confining grip of reason, one is granted access to rich imaginative thought; the wellspring of inspiration from which all great poetry is conceived. This concept is best illuminated when looking at Keats’ own poetry, and perhaps nowhere more vividly than in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The ode stands as an ideal exercise of the concept and a showcase of its virtues. Within it are lessons, stories and bits of wisdom that stand as the fruits of the imaginative labor that is negative capability.

By writing an apostrophe to a fictional artifact, Keats is implying that there is value in considering the imagined and theoretical. The rational-minded observer of an ancient decorated urn would be quick to resign to the unknowability of the scene depicted on it, knowing that it is a mystery whose answer is lost in time, but for Keats this unknowability is not a hindrance, but an invitation. Throughout the poem, he gives the urn life through contemplation of its mystery, rather than letting the mystery stand as a frustrating and impenetrable boundary. In each of the poem’s first three lines, he assigns the urn a personified role: first as a “bride of quietness,” second, as a “foster-child of silence and slow time,” and third, as a “Sylvan historian.” Immediately, the urn is removed altogether from the world of objects, made animate and given a voice to perform these three tasks. As a bride of quietness it inspires meditative contemplation, as a foster-child of slow time it cheats the forces of degradation and death, and as a Sylvan historian it connects us with our past. Throughout the poem, Keats employs negative capability to allow the urn’s imagery to dutifully perform these three roles.

The urn’s role as a bride of quietness is best depicted in the first four lines of the second stanza: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheardAre sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:” (11-14) The idea of an “unheard melody” playing to the “spirit ditties of no tone” is inscrutable, bordering on the supernatural, but Keats seems to be implying that the inanimate nature of such art leaves room for fantastical interpretation—that negative capability grants the observer the power to populate the absence of sound with sweeter “unheard” melodies of the mind. It is the silent mystery of the urn that invites the many questions posed by the speaker throughout the ode: “What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? / What mad pursuit?” (8-9) As a “bride of quietness” the urn lends its mystery to inspired interpretation. The urn’s role as a “foster-child of silence and slow time” is made clear in the speaker’s observations regarding the suspension of time in the static pastoral scene. The two lovers on the verge of kissing are suspended in the moment just before fulfillment: “never canst thou kiss, / Though winning near the goal yet,” and the woman’s beauty, Keats observes, “cannot fade.” (17-19) Again, the static nature of the object proves to be the opposite of a limitation, but is in fact a preserved scene in which bliss is suspended and death cheated. In the final stanza, Keats acknowledges the seeming immortality of the urn: “When old age shall this generation waste / thou shalt remain amidst other woe than ours.” (46-47) By making these observations, Keats shines a light on a magical, though abstract aspect of the urn, and of art itself: to capture and make savorable a moment, place, person or sensation that existed only fleetingly, or not at all.

As a “Sylvan historian,” the urn grants its beholder access to the imagery and aesthetic of the past. Among the several demonstrations of negative capability within the poem, this is the most practical. However, the manner in which Keats explores the urn’s history is far removed from cold reason. In the first stanza, Keats poses several questions regarding the mystery of the scene on the urn, at one point plainly questioning the image: “What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape?” (5) The following two stanzas consist of ecstatic assumptions of the imagination (“Ah, happy, happy boughs!”), before arriving at more questions in the fourth: “Who are these coming to the sacrifice?” (31) He follows this stanza of questions and closes the poem, not with imagined answers, but with a celebration of the urn. Keats has made it clear by now, through his musings, that these questions are answerable by the mind, and in his famous closing lines he suggests that the imagined answers are as valid as the unknowable history: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ —that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” (49-50) This closing message urges the reader to delight in the freedom of unknowability, and assures us that in doing so we will not uncover the factual truth, but an equally valid impression of it.

More subtly through the poem, Keats hints at a potential drawback of negative capability through a glimpse of the scene as a “cold pastoral” and the description of a cloying sensation brought on by the sustained display of celebration. He’s aware that negative capability, as with all forms of human thought, has limits and drawbacks. As is made clear in “Ode to a Nightingale”, this is the thorn in Keats’ side—that however powerful imagination may be, it offers only a brief reprieve from life’s pains. However, his success when considering art (through the urn) is more pronounced than when considering nature (through the nightingale). This is perhaps because art is the engine of artistic inspiration, while nature’s unpredictable bluntness has a tendency to quell it with harsh reality. The rational mind, when considering the urn, is confined to fact, cautiously fighting off assumption or imagination, while the poetic mind, stimulated by the urns very existence, is gifted all that is fathomable upon its consideration. Our ability to extract imagined beauty from art makes a God of our consciousness, and the beauty we observe, as Keats says to his brothers, “overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”