10 Years After

I'm still trying to feel as though I have a full grasp of what Keats meant by negative capability. What does he mean by "examine King Lear, and you will find this exemplified throughout. . ." ? At first I thought it meant, due to the passage continuing ". . . but in this picture [Benjamin West's Death on the Pale Horse] we have unpleasantness without any momentuous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness. . ." and a previous passage reading ". . . Art is its inensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth" (our textbook has a footnote for this passage which reads: "Keat's solution to a problem at least as old as Aristotle's Poetics: why do we take pleasure in the aesthetic representation of a subject that in life would be painful or ugly?") , that in King Lear the melodious false words of the two elder daughters are agreeable to King Lear whereas the truthfull, though hurtfull, words of the younger sister is a pain to him. (I have read that Keats had previously commented that West "painted by the yard" and I suspect that is what Keats means by concluding ". . . The picture is larger than 'Christ Rejected'.")

"Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason--" and "John Keats's term, which he cryptically glossed (in a letter of December 21, 1817) as the ability to be "in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Most men , keats held, lacked this capability; they do not perceive the complexities of reality but, in an effort to clear up all the ir uncertainties, they rather distort reality by filtering it through their own personality. The great poet, on the other hand, has the ability to escape from or negate his own personality and thus open himself fully to the complex reality around him. Negative capability is sometimes identified with empathy, sometimes with objectivity. Keats further discusses the idea (though he does not use the term) in a letter of October 27, 1818." ("A Dictionary of Literary, Dramatic, and Cinematic Terms", Barnet, Berman,& Burto )