Ambiguity and complexity – Keats’s ‘negative capability’ – are missing from our world today
In a letter of 1817, John Keats wrote: “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.” One thing in this quotation stands out: the notion that negative capability, the ability to hold complexity and ambiguity in the mind, without requiring a clear resolution, is the mark of true greatness, especially, but not only, in writers. Keats was arguing that negative capability is a quality desirable in all of us, the mark of the greatest in any field of endeavour.
Later in the letter, Keats criticised his peer Samuel Taylor Coleridge. That poet, he wrote, would fail to discern a “fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery”, because he was “incapable of remaining content with half knowledge”. The argument is that fine-grained, delicate verisimilitude can be captured from the most apparently mysterious context, if only one has the eyes to see it. There is, one might add, verisimilitude to be discovered in fiction, and art of all kinds, that will never be discerned in the pages of an official report.
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