The poet John Keats introduced this term in a letter written in December 1817 to define a literary quality "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 and reason."
Keats contrasted to this quality the writing of Coleridge, who "would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude .. . from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge," and went on to express the general principle "that with a great poet the sense of beauty over comes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration."
The elusive term has entered critical circulation and has accumulated a
large body of commentary. When conjoined with observations in other letters by Keats, "negative capability" can be taken
(1) to characterize an impersonal, or objective, author who maintains aesthetic distance, as opposed to a subjective author who is personally involved with the characters and actions represented in a work of literature, and as opposed also to an author who uses a literary work to present and to make persuasive his or her personal beliefs;
and
(2) to suggest that, when embodied in a beautiful artistic form, the liter-
ary subject matter, concepts, and characters are not subject to the ordinary standards of evidence, truth, and morality, as we apply these standards in the course of our practical experience.
Comentarios