Negative Capability - Keats

John Keats did a great service to English poetry in special and English language in general. Here, we are concerned to discuss his negative capability. Negative capability in Literature is a capacity to negate one’s individual personality and to identify oneself with the object that the writer wants to portray at in his work of art. Keats had capacity to insert himself into anything he saw or heard. He used to accept it and identify himself with it. In one of his poems, Keats says;   “If a sparrow comes in my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.” According to John Keats, a poet has no identity. He forcibly remarked once;   “The poet has no self. It is very thing or nothing, it enjoys light and shade, it lives in gusto, be if it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated.”   For Keats, necessary quality of poetry is a submission to the things as they are, without any effort to intellectualize them into somethi...