Keats' Poetic Thought and Negative Capability

Language and Literary Devices

  • Pathetic Fallacy:
    • A literary device where human qualities and emotions are attributed to inanimate objects or nature.
    • The term "pathetic" refers to imparting emotions, not to being miserable.
  • Sensory Imagery:
    • Visual, oral, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory imagery are used to create vivid descriptions.
  • Synesthesia:
    • A literary device where one sense is described in terms of another (e.g., describing a sound as a color).
  • Figurative Language:
    • Includes metaphors, similes, and personification.
  • Semantic Fields:
    • Groups of words related in meaning.
  • Hyperbole:
    • Exaggeration for effect.
  • Sound Devices:
    • Plosives, liquids, dentals, sibilance, gutturals, fricatives, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia (cacophony).
  • Classical Allusions:
    • References to classical mythology or literature (e.g., Apollo, the Greek god of the sun, light, literature, and music).

Structure

  • Focus on octaves: What is the central theme or idea in each eight-line stanza?
  • Syllable count: How many syllables are in each line, and what effect does this have on the poem's rhythm?
  • Rhyme patterns: Identify and analyze the rhyme scheme; what effect does the rhyme scheme choice have on the poem?
  • Structural Choices: Look for juxtaposition, repetition, and their effects.

Negative Capability

  • Origin:
    • The concept arose from Keats' letter to his brothers in Teignmouth on December 21, 1817 (winter solstice).
    • The letter reflects on the conviviality and conversations during the Christmas season.
  • Keats's Reflection:
    • Keats recounts a "disquisition" (rigorous discussion) with Dilke, not a "dispute." This distinction is crucial.
  • Definition:
    • Negative Capability: The ability to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
  • Coleridge's Influence and Keats's Response:
    • Coleridge (Biographia Literaria) suggested that poets should reconcile opposite or discordant qualities.
    • Keats responded that seeking such reconciliation can lead to fallacious or superficially true conclusions.
  • Core Idea:
    • Negative Capability involves being at ease with uncertainty, contradiction, and disagreement.
    • The poet should have a dispositional mind content with half-knowledge, where meaning is not fixed.
  • Creativity and Equivocality:
    • Creativity is enabled, not inhibited, by the ambiguities and tensions inherent in uncertainties and doubts.
    • These ambiguities become defining features of Keats' style.
  • Context and Influence:
    • Keats' creative imagination was responsive to and informed by his surroundings, conversations, and the season (December).
    • The negative capability letter demonstrates the interrelationship between Keats' life, letters, and poetry.

In Drear-Nighted December

  • Contrast with the Letter:
    • Unlike the friendly converse in the negative capability letter, the lyric presents harsh, frozen images.
    • It explores nature's contentment with winter, darkness, and the dreariness of the season.
  • Connection to Negative Capability:
    • The poem reflects Keats' ideas on negative capability, aligning with his thoughts on uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts.
  • Central Theme:
    • Explores how we might share in nature's contentment with "drowning-ited uncertainty" without struggling against the past joy of summer's stability.
  • Use of Negations:
    • The repeated use of "never," "nor," and "not" emphasizes the ambiguous feeling of absence and loss.
    • It interrogates how to articulate such feelings.
  • Absence and Loss:
    • The loss of joy is presented not as a senseless void but as an "absent presence" or painful void that causes one to writhe.
  • Failure of Rhyme:
    • The poem suggests an inability for rhyme (poetic language) to contain such an experience.
    • Michael O'Neill argues that the poem arises from the feel it is said never to have found words for.
    • The word "rhyme" stands apart by not rhyming within its stanza.
  • Potentiality of Uncertainty:
    • Despite its apparent failure, rhyme still connects to "prime" and "time" from previous stanzas.
    • This connection suggests that the dark, obscure, and uncertain night of December is the prime time for engendering thought and sensation within poetic language.
    • The poem presents a location of budding potential resisting the limitations of language.
  • Winter's Importance:
    • Winter, often underestimated, is significant for Keats' poetic thought.
    • December exemplifies Keats' achievements, embodying the spirit of negative capability.