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In this paper, I examine Keat's notion of “Negative Capability” in the light of D. W. Winnicott's concept of “play” and his views on creativity generally. For Keats, “Negative Capability” was that “quality … possessed” especially by individuals of genius (Shakespeare was his prime example) which he described in his Letters as
when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—Coleridge, 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.1
The central concern of this passage is the conditions which make creative vision possible. Creativity, creative vision, was also a prime concern of D. W. Winnicott, especially in the papers collected in his final volume, Playing and Reality. This paper will explore how those concerns illuminate one another and what light they shed on our ideas of creativity in general.
Winnicott's focus on creativity grew out of his preoccupation with play and the early development of children, especially as manifested in their relations with “transitional objects.” In his seminal paper on “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,”2 Winnicott said he was chiefly interested in what he called “an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute”;