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