You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In a letter to his brothers written in December 1817, when he was twenty-two years old, John Keats wrote: 'I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke [a member of his intimate circle], 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—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—' (9, p. 193).
The striking phrase underscored by Keats does not recur as such in his writings. Its sense however appears frequently as one of the essential points in his understanding of the workings of the creative mind, and consideration of it may serve as an entrance into Keats's theory of creativity that can perhaps be best summed up in another phrase: 'That which is creative must create itself' (9, p. 374). This theory seems to me to deserve attention not only in view of the literary achievement of Keats, but with regard to certain implications for psychoanalysis latent in the poet's expressions.
Keats contrasted men of 'negative capability' with 'consequitive' men (9, p. 218), like his friend and publisher John Taylor, whom he respects as reasoners, philosophers, with thoroughly logical minds—but at their most developed polar opposites from himself, and above all from his supreme ideal, Shakespeare. At one time or another Keats varied in his estimation of the importance of knowledge as such, at times reproaching himself for his lack of knowledge and complaining, a few months after he wrote the 'negative capability' letter, now in a letter to Taylor, that he knew nothing, had read