‘Negative Capability’ & in praise of poetry’s fine excesses

A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe. ~Dylan Thomas

Western literature has had an unbroken tradition of poet-philosophers and a developed continuum of critique that has led to a robust literary culture. So when the much loved Keating (Dead Poets Society) tells his class, “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for”, his is yet another voice (from the space of popular culture) in the advocacy of literature as a special human activity as opposed to other more “useful” professions. If collated, these numerous treatises, written at different points in time, from the Greek schools to 20th Century poet laureates, make for a fairly detailed dialogue about poetics, aesthetics and society. These touchstones, often revisited, become points of departure, sometimes ports of arrival, and sometimes lighthouses for those venturing into the rough seas of the treacherous profession of writing. For theory-obsessed English departments, it is a reminder that dig if you will, some impenetrable bits will be beyond the prescriptive limits of your fancy wherewithal.

John Keats coined “Negative Capability” that can be explained as the willingness (of poets) to pursue an ideal of beauty even when it leads to uncertainty and ambiguity, an acceptance of insights that occur on the strength of felt harmony and not necessarily that of reason. Pedagogically, one of the more complex literary ideas for undergraduate students, one could situate it in a broader matrix. In Keats’ view, Shakespeare was replete with this quality and was able to lend voice to multiple voices than chase a monolithic philosophical ideal. This was akin to poetic spirit that Keats described elsewhere — “it enjoys light and shade, it lives in gusto, be it fair or foul, high or low…What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon Poet.” Perhaps the polyphony of theatre added to that effect. It has to be said that Keats’ view of beauty is not to be understood in the narrow aesthetic sense, and does not preclude the higher ideal of “truth.” He outlined “Negative Capability” in a letter he wrote to his brothers George and Thomas in 1817: “Several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is when, man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason…that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”

In both the ideals one senses the Romantic sense for preserving mystery and denouncing poetry that has a “palpable design on us” as against the later Victorian spirit embodied by Tennyson for whom “all experience is an arch wherethro’/ gleams that untravell’d world… yearning in desire/To follow knowledge like a sinking star/ Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.” This was the spirit of Victorian reason at its peak, the ascendancy of colonial conquest at its prime: where knowledge falls into submission in front of a man of reason. For a society under the spell of unbridled power of conquest, to be bewitched with productivity in its singular command and to be then reminded of “negative capability” by the pallid litterateur looming in the shadows must have been incongruous. But then that is how it is with literary parameters. Literature also being more than sum of parts, like love, you won’t be able to figure it all out at once. Negative Capability revels in the recognition of disruptions, deviations and aporias that make for the human condition.

We could do with a bit of negative capability right now. It could sum up what is obliquely called a “literary spirit”, a charged attention to the several vagaries of the human condition.

The author is a teacher