Negative Capability (1 of 2)

“What Poetry Is Not (Which May Lead Us to What It Irriducibly Is); and Why People Say They Don’t Understand It; or Everything You Need to Know About Poetry You Already Know (Or Keats Can tell You)”  –Title of the packet distributed by Matthew Zapruder in his craft session yesterday

Negative Capability is a term invented, ostensibly by John Keats, in a letter to his brothers, dated December 21, 1817.  He had moved to London, to become an apothecary.  His intentions, however, were really to be a poet.  At this point, he had met the people who were “the scene.”

I’ll get to the letter, but first, we need context.

The idea surrounding Via Negativa is old. Older than old.  It is the process wherein we find what something is, by establishing what it is not.  A process in many religions, one might see God as: Not mortal, not physical, not in error, and so on.  Meditations upon what something is not lead, inevitably to what it is.

Kubla Kahn, a poem by Coleridge, was published one year before.  Despite the authorial commentary published with it, it is probably the best poem in the English language, in many ways.  Coleridge makes it clear that he was put up to publishing it, and it essentially was not, in his mind, a great poetic work, but a testament to how odd he was.  It was probably Byron, if anyone, who put him up to it.

Keats brother had died of tuberculosis, and he was, at this point, becoming ill.  At some level, he was (because he was studying to be an apothecary, remember) aware that he was going to die and that he did not have much time left.  This would turn out to be 4 more years.