{"id":11067,"date":"2013-10-31T12:20:10","date_gmt":"2013-10-31T16:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=11067"},"modified":"2013-10-31T12:20:10","modified_gmt":"2013-10-31T16:20:10","slug":"on-john-keatss-218th-birthday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/on-john-keatss-218th-birthday\/","title":{"rendered":"On John Keats’s 218th Birthday…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"keats\"<\/a>\u2026 here, what to my mind remains, besides & on a par with the poems, his greatest contribution to 20C & 21C poetics & thought, \u00a0& found in his\u00a0\u00a0Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21, ?27 December 1817<\/strong><\/p>\n

namely, Negative Capability:<\/strong>
\nHampstead Sunday
\n22 December 1818<\/p>\n

My dear Brothers<\/p>\n

I must crave your pardon for not having written ere this [ . . . ] [T]he excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth\u2014Examine King Lear & you will find this exemplified throughout; but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness\u2014The picture is larger than Christ rejected\u2014I dined with Haydon the sunday after you left, & had a very pleasant day, I dined too (for I have been out too much lately) with Horace Smith & met his two brothers with Hill & Kingston & one Du Bois, they only served to convince me, how superior humour is to wit in respect to enjoyment\u2014These men say things which make one start, without making one feel, they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have a mannerism in their very eating & drinking, in their mere handling a Decanter\u2014They talked of Kean & his low company\u2014Would I were with that company instead of yours said I to myself! I know such like acquaintance will never do for me & yet I am going to Reynolds, on wednesday\u2014Brown & Dilke walked with me & back from the Christmas pantomime.\u00a0 I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; 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\u2014I mean<\/a>Negative Capability<\/em>, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason<\/span>\u2014Coleridge, 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. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2026 here, what to my mind remains, besides & on a par with the poems, his greatest contribution to 20C & 21C poetics & thought, \u00a0& found in his\u00a0\u00a0Letter to George and Tom Keats,...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[830,90],"tags":[438,1443],"class_list":["post-11067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poet","category-poetics","tag-john-keats","tag-negative-capability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11067"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11067\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11075,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11067\/revisions\/11075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}