Red Tree Review

Understanding Negative Capability

1. Getting Started

Let’s explore Keats’s concept of negative capability and its importance to contemporary poetry.

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

  • generate a rough draft of a poem without “irritable reaching”
  • identify key facts related to the theory of negative capability

2. Video: Introducing Negative Capability

Access a transcript of this video.

3. Unpacking Negative Capability

The term negative capability first appears in a letter written by John Keats in 1818, the end of the age of enlightenment. This was a period defined by a widespread focus on science, reason, and facts. Keats introduces negative capability as a quality very different from empiricism–the capacity to accept “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats argues that, for great poets, “the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”

The three words Keats uses here–uncertainties, mysteries, doubts–offer the clearest window to understanding what negative capability means and why it is still important to poetry two hundred years later. His statement about “the sense of beauty” is equally important.

Click through the image reel below to learn about each of these aspects of negative capability.

Access a transcript of this image reel.

4. Knowledge Check

Great job!

Hmmm. Not quite. Have another look at the introduction to the previous section.

5. Ideas vs. Feeling

Often, people who find poetry frustrating to read are looking for things poetry simply does not offer, things like objectivity, answers, and reasoning.

The poem’s goal isn’t to inform or persuade the reader, but to invite the reader into an experience–through questions, sounds, imagery, syntax, story, and all of the other tools that give feeling to language.

Click on the image on the left to read “Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins. Use the following questions to guide your reading:

  • How does this poem invite us to experience “moments” rather than simply relaying “considerations” or “ideas”?
  • Consider this poem’s metaphors. How is a poem like a color slide? A beehive? A dark room? A maze? A lake?
  • Why is the poem tied to a chair? 
  • Why does Collins describe the interrogation of the poem as a kind of violence? How does this feel?

9. Prompt: Negative Capability

Create a rough draft of a poem by using one of the following methods:

  • Option 1: Write about a significant event in your life, but tell it from a neutral, third-person perspective, without interpreting it or deciding what it means.
  • Option 2: Write a poem focusing on sensory details, without worrying about the “meaning” or the “ideas” being conveyed.
  • Option 3: Write a poem beginning with a question. Allow the poem to explore possibilities, but do not reach for answers.

Share the resulting poem with some fellow writers whose opinions you trust, either informally or in a workshop setting. Ask them (and yourself) the following:

  • What in this draft feels worthy of expansion?
  • Where do you see the “heart” or “core” of this poem?
  • What might a successful revision of this rough draft look like?
  • Does this poem feel like it has an agenda?
  • Does the speaker in this poem feel too certain or sure of themselves?
  • What can be trimmed away to help create focus?

10. Quiz: Negative Capability

Want to test your knowledge? Try the following quiz. For each question below, identify the correct answer.

 

#1. Who first described the concept of negative capability?

#2. In what age did the concept of negative capability arise?

#3. Which of the following qualities belongs to the concept of negative capability?

#4. Which of the following qualities belongs to the concept of negative capability?

#5. Which of the following qualities belongs to the concept of negative capability?

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Results

Before You Go

Check out the following resources on negative capability:

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