I keep forgetting what negative capability is. None of the definitions took hold. Yours is a keeper. Ah, yes. This is how I live the best days of my life.
I love this concept. Work/Art/Talking about art can both be rigorous and non-determinant. I think that it's probably more rigorous in this way, but you get the old 'subjectiveness' argument (you can say whatever you want...). Well, just keep going. You're making a lot of sense to your readers and no doubt your students. Thanks for this time with Keats today!
Thanks! Yes, the idea of being both rigorous and non-determinant makes me think of the work you have been doing with the podcast lately. I love the way that you bring in thinkers like Derrida; so many people misread him as a destructive figure, but I find him generous and liberating in this way.
John, thanks for this, about such an important idea and moment in literary history – especially important now, as you say. When I teach introductory literature classes, especially poetry, it’s one of the first ideas I address, how students, readers of literature, often need to learn not to be lured by language into logic. From the perspective of the writer, how much of it arises from that liminal space where, of the moment, you’re making choices you haven’t fully articulated for yourself but you know are right.
So much catnip here, John. The culture of assessment does, indeed, offer false promises of mastery. In a post last year, I meditated on the humility that teaching requires. It's more like a faith journey than like continuous improvement in business. Anyone who has taught back-to-back sections of the same course knows this. The jokes/exercises/methods that work in one don't automatically work in the next. The mystery is humbling.
I appreciate your caveats about not giving up rigorous inquiry altogether. You wisely avoid politics, but there is a healthy dose of negative capability that we might apply to the current debate about Substack and free speech. Simply shouting our view louder is not going to move others; and the fact that there are two pretty clearly distinct sides in the conversation suggests a kind of irreducible complexity. No one wins by trying to take out the other camp.
Finally, I find myself often applying your British examples to American ones. So here are two fine American poems that encourage -- even advocate explicitly for -- negative capability.
Walt Whitman, "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"
Insightful post. I very much agree that we need more negative capability. Or as I phrased it in one article: writers need to not give away their trade secrets all the time. Not exactly the same thing, but not unrelated either. I hope as more and more people realize that technology doesn't have human answers, an appreciation of this element of the art of verse returns as a society-wide understanding. We'll see, in any case.
I think it is a great compliment to what you are saying here. The culture of mastery speaks to human insecurity and a culture that monetizes this with “aspirational” media. It leaves everyone in a state of want.
Here is an ironic quote from Kanye:
“Beauty has been stolen from the people and is being sold back to them under the concept of luxury!”
— Kanye West to the Oxford Guild
It is as if we don’t value beauty until it has a price tag on it. We are unable value poetry unless we are told it is useful. We look smart reciting it and analyzing it, but it never really becomes a part of us. We seem to do things to impress others and get ahead, rather than simply have our souls enlivened and nourished by art.
Thank you, John, for a beautiful article, showing a mastery, a capability, for content, form, meaning, and thesis. The scientists are powerful now, yet the wise ones of that number do allow for dreaming and just being. I have spent a lifetime trying to explain negative capability to myself, and to friends who are rational. When they grow tired of my lack of the necessary imagination, I draw back to the great poems, plays, and books wherein I find solace. Is there a threat from ‘overmastery’? Your article by its very texture and splendour suggests not so much. Your work proves the case of Keats et al. This is life-defining. Thank you.
I keep forgetting what negative capability is. None of the definitions took hold. Yours is a keeper. Ah, yes. This is how I live the best days of my life.
Wonderful! Negative capability has been.a life rule ever since first read Keats's letters (actually have it engraved...).
Happy to meet a fellow traveler!
I love this concept. Work/Art/Talking about art can both be rigorous and non-determinant. I think that it's probably more rigorous in this way, but you get the old 'subjectiveness' argument (you can say whatever you want...). Well, just keep going. You're making a lot of sense to your readers and no doubt your students. Thanks for this time with Keats today!
Thanks! Yes, the idea of being both rigorous and non-determinant makes me think of the work you have been doing with the podcast lately. I love the way that you bring in thinkers like Derrida; so many people misread him as a destructive figure, but I find him generous and liberating in this way.
This is timely, with so much positive assertion around Substack right now. Thank you!
Yes, all this strident assertion makes me tired.
John, thanks for this, about such an important idea and moment in literary history – especially important now, as you say. When I teach introductory literature classes, especially poetry, it’s one of the first ideas I address, how students, readers of literature, often need to learn not to be lured by language into logic. From the perspective of the writer, how much of it arises from that liminal space where, of the moment, you’re making choices you haven’t fully articulated for yourself but you know are right.
So much catnip here, John. The culture of assessment does, indeed, offer false promises of mastery. In a post last year, I meditated on the humility that teaching requires. It's more like a faith journey than like continuous improvement in business. Anyone who has taught back-to-back sections of the same course knows this. The jokes/exercises/methods that work in one don't automatically work in the next. The mystery is humbling.
I appreciate your caveats about not giving up rigorous inquiry altogether. You wisely avoid politics, but there is a healthy dose of negative capability that we might apply to the current debate about Substack and free speech. Simply shouting our view louder is not going to move others; and the fact that there are two pretty clearly distinct sides in the conversation suggests a kind of irreducible complexity. No one wins by trying to take out the other camp.
Finally, I find myself often applying your British examples to American ones. So here are two fine American poems that encourage -- even advocate explicitly for -- negative capability.
Walt Whitman, "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45479/when-i-heard-the-learnd-astronomer
Billy Collins, "Introduction to Poetry" (if you don't laugh and cry at that last line, God help you)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46712/introduction-to-poetry
Plus one to the poems @Joshua recommended at the end of the comment.
Yes, yes, and yes. All of it. And I love both poems.
Insightful post. I very much agree that we need more negative capability. Or as I phrased it in one article: writers need to not give away their trade secrets all the time. Not exactly the same thing, but not unrelated either. I hope as more and more people realize that technology doesn't have human answers, an appreciation of this element of the art of verse returns as a society-wide understanding. We'll see, in any case.
Thank you! And yes, we live in hope.
For my MFA we had to read this essay by Dana Gioia:
https://www.thedarkhorsemagazine.com/Featured/poetry-as-enchantment
I think it is a great compliment to what you are saying here. The culture of mastery speaks to human insecurity and a culture that monetizes this with “aspirational” media. It leaves everyone in a state of want.
Here is an ironic quote from Kanye:
“Beauty has been stolen from the people and is being sold back to them under the concept of luxury!”
— Kanye West to the Oxford Guild
It is as if we don’t value beauty until it has a price tag on it. We are unable value poetry unless we are told it is useful. We look smart reciting it and analyzing it, but it never really becomes a part of us. We seem to do things to impress others and get ahead, rather than simply have our souls enlivened and nourished by art.
🎯 💯 💕
Totally agree! And thanks for the Gioia link--will certainly read that.
Thank you, John, for a beautiful article, showing a mastery, a capability, for content, form, meaning, and thesis. The scientists are powerful now, yet the wise ones of that number do allow for dreaming and just being. I have spent a lifetime trying to explain negative capability to myself, and to friends who are rational. When they grow tired of my lack of the necessary imagination, I draw back to the great poems, plays, and books wherein I find solace. Is there a threat from ‘overmastery’? Your article by its very texture and splendour suggests not so much. Your work proves the case of Keats et al. This is life-defining. Thank you.
Very kind, Ian. Thank you!
Thank you! I’m so happy that it spoke to you.
Very glad it was helpful. It’s always lovely when different things that you are reading come together to shed light on each other.