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 )

In British Lit we went over some poems by Keats ("The Eve of St. Agnes", "Ode to Psyche" and "Ode to a Nightingale"). Wednesday we are going to try to finish up the poems by Keats.Also, we are to turn in the revision to our first paper. He said he wanted us to correct any errors in our papers, address any comments he might have made, and look for alternative passages. I think I'll try to talk to him tomorrow between classes to determine what the underlining was all about. Otherwise, I plan to just correct the few grammatical errors and turn it back in. I've been contemplating adding an additional passage to illustrate my view of what nature meant to Wordsworth: his use of ballads as a way of hearkening back to the days of antiquity, before the industrial revolution, a time when people were closer to nature.

Also, Wednesday I have that vocab quiz I didn't study for over the weekend. I'll do that this afternoon while at work. Thursday I have two tests; a test in American Government over 4 chapters and a test in World Civ. over primary phase cultures and evolution. I think I'll go over the American Government chapters tonight while at work. I also have an online study group for my World Civ to attend if I can borrow my bosses laptop.

Friday night I watched Four Feathers and loved it. Saturday I scoured the theaters in Knoxville to catch Possession again but it had ceased showing in the few (read two) theatres it was playing in. Also over the weekend, I continued to listen to the audiobook for The Compleat Angler.There was a neat passage about water-snakes:

And let me tell you, that as there be water and land frogs, so there be land and water snakes. Concerning which take this observation, that the land-snake breeds and hatches her eggs, which become young snakes, in some old dunghill, or a like hot place: but the water-snake, which is not venomous, and as I have been assured by a great observer of such secrets, does not hatch, but breed her young alive, which she does not then forsake, but bides with them, and in case of danger will take them all into her mouth and swim away from any apprehended danger, and then let them out again when she thinks all danger to be past: these be accidents that we Anglers sometimes see, and often talk of.