This is why Keats's negative capability – "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason" – is so challenging to rational animals like us.
Keats called the creative process "negative capability... when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason".
"I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason..."...
He is trying to update Keats's notion of "Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge".
Then these, from John Keats' letters: It struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason...
Then these, from John Keats' letters: It struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason..
What quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously -- I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
Negative capability, he supposed, was "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" – and Keats took that passivity or willingness to let things remain uncertain to be essential to literary achievement.
In a famous letter to his brothers, the 22-year-old English poet John Keats refers to "Negative Capability," the state of mind when someone "is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any reaching after fact or reason".
It brings to mind Keats' coinage, "Negative Capability", which the poet famously defined as "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason".
Not negation, but negative capability.
