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Negative Capability and Wise Passiveness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Jacob D. Wigod
Jacob D. Wigod*
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Cambridge 38, Mass.
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Extract

Garrod, in his essay on Keats, equates Wordsworth's “wise passiveness” with Keats's “negative capability.” At least, he fancies that Keats's expression embodies “a quality not essentially different” from Wordsworth's. I contend that, in truth, the two are poles apart.

In context, Garrod is referring to Keats's attitude toward Coleridge, as set forth in his famous letter of December 1817 to his brothers. Going to and returning from a Christmas pantomime with his friends Brown and Dilke, Keats had “not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects”; whence, suddenly “several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously— I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and 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.”2

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 67 , Issue 4 , June 1952 , pp. 383 - 390
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952

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References

1 H. W. Garrod, Keats, 2nd ed. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1939), p. 40. Garrod misquotes “wise passiveness” here and on p. 54, terming it “wise passivity.”

2 The Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman, 3rd ed. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1947), p. 72. All parenthetical page references in my text are to this work.

3 A position which Matthew Arnold accorded him on the basis of his felicity of expression, his “rounded perfection.” That evaluation, of course, is quite transcended here.

4 This may have been true of the Coleridge whom Keats knew but certainly not of the younger Coleridge who dreamed of “Kubla Khan” and told the mysterious tales of Christabel and The Ancient Mariner.

5 See Sidney Colvin, John Keats (New York, 1925), pp. 141-142. Keats met Dilke in late 1816 or early 1817, but he had been away and had been busy working on Endymion from April to Nov. 1817. In Dec. 1817, then, arrived his first opportunity to become better acquainted with Dilke.

6 Letters, p. 76. See also The Keats Circle, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Harvard Univ. Press, 1948), i, lxxxi.

7 See Colvin, p. 246.

8 The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest De Selincourt (Oxford Univ. Press, 1942), p. 942.

9 See Letters, pp. 68, 79, 140, 144, 345. See also Rollins, ii, 274-275.

10 See John Middleton Murry, Keats and Shakespeare (Oxford Univ. Press, 1949), pp. 229, 65-67.

11 See “Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds,” 11. 96-97; cf. the fine passage in Letters, pp. 316-317.

12 Murry has pointed out that whenever Keats uses the word “speculation,” he means “contemplation.” Studies in Keats (Oxford Univ. Press, 1930), pp. 93 ff.

13 Rollins, i, 59-60.

14 Tintern Abbey,“ ll. 37-49. In this passage, the ”affections“ are the senses which receive impressions and carry them to the soul.

15 “The Tables Turned,” 11. 21-24, and “Tintern Abbey,” 11. 107-111. Italics are mine.

16 See Letters, pp. 347, 315.

17 The same, p. 104. The title was supplied by an editor of Keats.

18 The Evolution of Keats's Poetry (Harvard Univ. Press, 1936), i, 367-368.