Keats and Negative Capability

Li Ou

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781441187901
• eBook ISBN: 9781441101037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"Negative capability", the term John Keats used only once in a letter to his brothers, is a well-known but surprisingly unexplored concept in literary criticism and aesthetics. This book is the first book-length study of this central concept in seventy years. As well as clarifying the meaning of the term and giving an anatomy of its key components, the book gives a full account of the history of this idea.
It traces the narrative of how the phrase first became known and gradually gained currency, and explores its primary sources in earlier writers, principally Shakespeare and William Hazlitt, and its chief Modernist successors, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Meanwhile, the term is also applied to Keats's own poetry, which manifests the evolution of the idea in Keats's poetic practice. Many of the comparative readings of the relevant texts, including King Lear, illuminate the interconnections between these major writers. The book is an original and significant piece of scholarship on this celebrated concept.

Chapter 1
Genealogy of Negative Capability

‘I am very near Agreeing with Hazlit that Shakspeare is enough for us’ (KL I:143), Keats writes in his letter dated 11 May 1817. The statement names the two most important figures in the process of Keats’s conceiving of the idea of negative capability, the former contemporary yet reflecting on the spirit of his age critically, the latter historical but enjoying a revival in Keats’s time to which the former made a significant contribution.

‘Hazlitt’s Depth of Taste’

Many critics have either glanced over or focused on Keats’s connection with Hazlitt, giving similar accounts with more or less the same evidence. Clarence D. Thorpe’s ‘Keats and Hazlitt: A Record of Personal Relationship and Critical Estimate’ (1947), one of the earliest essays in this area, focuses on their personal relationship and gives it a fairly full coverage, concluding that it was ‘one of mutual respect and friendship’ (502). Kenneth Muir’s essay in 1951 and Bate’s ‘Negative Capability’ chapter in his 1964 biography study Hazlitt’s intellectual influence on Keats.¹ Muir observes that Keats has derived from Hazlitt ‘the ideas … on the poetical character, on the nature of Shakespeare’s genius, and on the relative deficiencies of Wordsworth and Coleridge’ (1958: 158), while Bate, more thoroughly than Muir, discusses Hazlitt’s influence on Keats in the aspects of ‘the sympathetic character of imagination’, his view of drama as ‘the highest form of poetry’, and ‘[h]is harsher criticism of his own contemporaries’ for their egotism (259). R. S. White gives one chapter of his book, Keats as a Reader of Shakespeare (1987), to Hazlitt’s impact on Keats in his reading of Shakespeare. Though he does not claim direct relevance to the topic,² many connections he makes are also relevant to negative capability, expressed in his subheadings such as, ‘a philosophy of particularity’, ‘the primacy of feeling’, ‘the pictorial’, ‘contrast’ and ‘movement and impression’.

What these critics have more or less agreed on has been challenged by a more recent essay by Uttara Natarajan in 1996, who argues:

[B]y drawing exclusively on Hazlitt’s account of Shakespeare in the formulation of his own views on poetic composition, Keats bases his poetic theory on exactly those characteristics of poetic composition that Hazlitt deprecates in almost every other case but [emphasis his] Shakespeare’s. (66)

The tide-turning conclusion is rather questionable, for Keats’s reading and absorption of Hazlitt, as I shall show, are not limited to Hazlitt’s commentaries on Shakespeare. Nor is Hazlitt’s view on Shakespeare exceptional to his general theory; it is quite consistent with his overall values. Natarajan’s arguments, based on some passages of Hazlitt she selects and reads with particular emphases on certain elements, are a bit precarious for such a prolific and wide-ranging writer as Hazlitt. My following arguments, therefore, are closer to those of the earlier critics, but I shall also stress Keats’s divergence from Hazlitt in the very aspects he has derived from Hazlitt. The most important ideas Keats has absorbed from Hazlitt are also the most characteristic Hazlittean ones, those of gusto and disinterestedness, which were transformed into the Keatsian terms of intensity, non-egotism and sympathetic imagination to become strands of his idea of negative capability. More specifically with respect to poetry, Hazlitt’s high regard for dramatic poetry as against lyrical, and consequently his esteem for Shakespeare and disapproval of contemporary poets, have become important poetic criteria of Keats’s own, making him visualize a further horizon than his contemporaries had reached and in turn orienting his own poetry in a more dramatic direction. This aspect of Hazlitt’s influence on Keats has been given attention by both John Kinnaird in his 1977 essay and David Bromwich in his chapter on Keats in his 1983 book on Hazlitt. Kinnaird points out that ‘Hazlitt’s challenge to Wordsworth had the effect of forcing, or encouraging, the second Romantic generation of poets’ (14), Keats in particular, who ‘healed’ the ‘breach of imagination’ between Wordsworth and Shakespeare by his odes, ‘which come as close as any in the language to … a genuinely dramatic … lyricism of intersubjectivity’ (15).³ Bromwich makes the assertion in a bolder manner: ‘by helping Keats to revise his own idea of the imagination, Hazlitt altered the course of modern poetry’. He continues with more vehemence:

All along Hazlitt had been moving him in the direction of Shakespeare, and if one looks in romantic poetry for a Shakespearean fullness, and a Shakespearean gusto in dialogue, the place to find them is nowhere in the poetic drama of the period, but in Keats’s odes.

He also carries the point further to extend the lineage to the modernists, remarking, ‘Keats’s aims in poetry and Hazlitt’s in criticism place both in accord with a concern for dramatic form that modern poets have been unwilling to disclaim’ (401). In both Kinnaird and Bromwich, however, Hazlitt is the focus while Keats serves as a foil, so their arguments need to be further explored from Keats’s point of view.

These ideas of Hazlitt’s, as Bromwich rightly stresses, may not be so much an ‘influence’ (369) on as a communication to Keats, for ‘Keats understood Hazlitt’s ideas till they became second nature to him’ (370). The affinity, however, did not manifest itself in their actual relationship, which was never really close.

The first link between Keats and Hazlitt was made by Leigh Hunt, who showed some of Keats’s early verse to a group including Hazlitt, the Shelleys and Godwin (KL I:33), but there is no record of Hazlitt’s reaction, though Hunt reported an overall approval. The two met in the winter of 1816–1817 (Muir 139),⁴ and became gradually acquainted because of their overlapping circles, but the relationship never turned intimate. Nevertheless, Keats had a deep faith and trust in his older contemporary, thinking of seeking his guidance at two quite critical points in his life. The first was April 1818, not long after he wrote the ‘Epistle to J. H. Reynolds’, which reveals the crisis he was experiencing at that time. It was also around then that thoughts on ‘knowledge’ and ‘philosophy’ frequented Keats’s letters, in one of which he tells Reynolds that he will ‘prepare [himself] to ask Hazlitt in about a years time the best metaphysical road [he] can take’ (KL I:274). The other occasion was September 1819, when Keats was caught in financial difficulty and considered making a living by entering journalism, and his first thought was to ‘enquire of Hazlitt’ (KL II:174, 177) about the prospect. What might have brought them closer were the venomous reviewers they shared. Blackwood’s attacked not only the poetry of Keats and the Cockney School but also the prose of Hazlitt, who was so incensed as to plan to bring suit for libel against it. Keats records this in his letter to Dilke on 20 September 1818: ‘I suppose you will have heard that Hazlitt has on foot a prosecution against Blackwood – I dined with him a few days sinc[e] at Hessey’s – there was not a word said about [it], though I understand he is excessively vexed’ (KL I:368). The silence may indicate tacit understanding, but it also suggests a distance in the relationship. When Hazlitt wrote the biting ‘Letter to Gifford’, editor of the Quarterly Review and their common foe again, in March 1819, Keats reported the news to George in exhilaration, and copied for him excerpts from it running as long as about five pages. Ironically, this association also became the way in which Hazlitt chiefly remembered ‘poor Keats’⁵ after his death, thus joining Shelley and Byron in spreading the myth that Keats was ‘killed off’ by the malicious reviewers. The last recorded meeting of the two took place at Haydon’s exhibition on 25 March 1820, reported by Haydon: ‘The room was full. Keats and Hazlitt were up in a corner, really rejoicing’ (KL II:284n). Some critics tend to read too much into the scene, regarding it as a reassuring sign of a warm friendship between two great men, which, even granted, should not be identified with Hazlitt the critic’s estimation of Keats the poet, which can only be described as endorsement with reservation.

Hazlitt’s criticism of Keats is most fully expressed in his essay ‘Effeminacy of Character’ in Table-Talk (1821–1822), where he writes:

I cannot help thinking that the fault of Mr. Keats’s poems was a deficiency in masculine energy of style. He had beauty, tenderness, delicacy, in an uncommon degree, but there was a want of strength and substance. … There is a want of action, of character, and so far, of imagination, but there is exquisite fancy. All is soft and fleshy, without bone or muscle. We see in him the youth, without the manhood of poetry. (VIII:254–5)

This view, chiefly based on Endymion, was partly altered after Hazlitt read Keats’s later poems, but never completely abandoned. In ‘On Reading Old Books’, written in 1826, Hazlitt remarks: ‘the reading of Mr. Keats’s Eve of Saint Agnes lately made me regret that I was not young again’ (XII:225), which, apparently complimentary, only reminds one of his former criticism. In a ‘Critical List of Authors’ included in Select British Poets Hazlitt compiled in 1824, Hazlitt writes on Keats in a particularly warm tone rarely found in his commentaries on his contemporaries, evaluating Keats as the one who ‘gave the greatest promise of genius of any poet of his day’ (IX:244), but when he continues, the old reservation comes back:

He displayed extreme tenderness, beauty, originality, and delicacy of fancy; all he wanted was manly strength and fortitude to reject the temptations of singularity in sentiment and expression. Some of his shorter and later pieces are, however, as free from faults as they are full of beauties. (IX:244–5)

The pieces Hazlitt has in mind are represented by his selections: three excerpts from Endymion, including the procession part at the beginning, the hymn to Pan, and the song to Sorrow, and one passage from Hyperion, as well as ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Fancy’ and ‘Robin Hood’ (Bromwich 369). Despite his mixed critical attitude to Keats, Hazlitt did become in effect ‘Keats’s first anthologist’ (Bromwich 369).

There is no question, on the other hand, about Keats’s admiration for Hazlitt, most explicitly expressed in his often quoted statement made to Haydon in the letter dated 10 January 1818, that together with Wordsworth’s Excursion and Haydon’s paintings, ‘Hazlitt’s depth of Taste’ are the ‘three things to rejoice at in this Age’ (KL I:203). Still earlier, on 21 September 1817, when relating to Reynolds that he was reading Hazlitt’s Round Table, Keats has already expressed his esteem for Hazlitt warmly, ‘I know he thinks himself not estimated by ten People in the world – I wishe he knew he is’ (KL I:166). Keats might have read the essays in The Round Table before, which were collected from Hazlitt’s contributions to Hunt’s Examiner started from 1814 (Thorpe 489), an important part of Keats’s early reading, and it was probably also around that time that Keats read Essay on the Principles of Human Action (W. J. Bate 1964: 256). When Hazlitt gave the Lectures on the English Poets from January to March 1818, Keats attended almost all of them, and though he did not go to the later Lectures on the English Comic Writers delivered from November 1818 to January 1819, he read the manuscript (KL II:24). Keats also had a copy of Characters of Shakespear’s Plays which he marked and annotated. Other writings of Hazlitt’s Keats has mentioned include Hazlitt’s essay on Southey in May 1817 (KL I:137–8, 144) and one of Hazlitt’s contributions to the Edinburgh Review (KL I:301), which he must have read regularly. So it can be assumed that his reading was not restricted to the above pieces of which there is some record.

Hazlitt appears only once in Keats’s poetry, in the opening surreal scene of the epistle to J. H. Reynolds: ‘Voltaire with casque and shield and habergeon, / And Alexander with his night-cap on – / Old Socrates a tying his cravat; / And Hazlitt playing with Miss Edgeworth’s cat’ (7–10).⁶ This ‘theatre of the absurd’ does not tell much except for Keats’s familiarity with Hazlitt’s attack on the bluestockings. In Keats’s prose, however, Hazlitt, whose style is highly regarded by Keats, figures more prominently. In May 1817, Keats mentions Hazlitt’s article on Southey’s Letter to William Smith twice in his letters, commenting admiringly that the conclusion is rendered ‘with such a Thunderclap’ and ‘appears to me like a Whale’s back in the Sea of Prose’ (KL I:138). Later, reading Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Comic Writers in manuscript, Keats describes its style with the ‘usual abrupt manner, and fiery laconiscism’ (KL II:24) in his letter on 2 January 1819. When reporting to his brother about Hazlitt’s fiery retaliation on Gifford in March 1819, Keats remarks, ‘He hath a demon as he himself says of Lord Byron’ (KL II:76). Keats’s enthusiastic review on Kean, also the best Shakespearean actor according to Hazlitt, in 21 December 1817 Champion, around the time of the negative capability letter, not only resembles Hazlitt’s spontaneous style but adopts his vocabulary, so that one sentence can be ‘easily mistakable for one of Hazlitt’s’ (Bromwich 367): ‘There is an indescribable gusto in [Kean’s] voice, by which we feel that the utterer is thinking of the past and the future, while speaking of the instant’ (KPB: 530). ‘Gusto’ is easily recognizable, and the sentence is also very close to Hazlitt’s comments on Shakespeare: ‘He had “a mind reflecting ages past,” and present’ (V:47), and ‘The passions are in a state of projection. Years are melted down to moments, and every instant teems with fate’ (V:51).

Such borrowings are numerous in Keats’s letters.⁷ One of Keats’s poetic axioms, ‘if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all’ (KL I:238–9), is reminiscent of Hazlitt’s claim in ‘On Posthumous Fame’: ‘It is … one characteristic mark of the highest class of excellence to appear to come naturally from the mind of the author, without consciousness or effort’ (IV:24). What Keats describes as ‘[t]he innumerable compositions and decompositions which take place between the intellect and its thousand materials before it arrives at that trembling delicate and snail-horn perception of Beauty’ (KL I:264–5) find similar expressions in Hazlitt’s lecture ‘On Shakespeare and Milton’, where he comments on the characterization of Shakespeare with ‘In Shakespeare there is a continual composition and decomposition of its elements’ (V:51). Even in Keats’s verse, ‘the mighty dead’ (I:21) in the opening stanza of Endymion has been used by Hazlitt in his essay ‘On Classical Education’ (IV:5) in The Round Table. Many of Keats’s favourite words, such as ‘truth’, ‘beauty’, ‘speculation’, ‘disagreeable’ and ‘evaporate’, are often employed by Hazlitt as well, but they are more likely words of currency in their time. All these clues may lead us to the most important ideas of Hazlitt that Keats has imbibed. A particularly relevant case is Keats’s comment on West’s painting made in the negative capability letter, which was also criticized by Hazlitt.

Death on the Pale Horse and ‘Gusto’

Hazlitt first quotes the laudatory advertisement on the painting, ready to be polemical: ‘The general effect proposed to be excited by this picture is the terrible sublime … until lost in the opposite extremes of pity and horror’ (XVIII:136). The tragic cathartic effect it claims fails to convey itself to Hazlitt, who comments that the ‘Death’ painted by West ‘has not the calm, still, majestic form of Death, killing by a look, – withering by a touch. His presence does not make the still air cold. … The horse … is not “pale,” but white’; in summary, ‘there is no gusto, no imagination in Mr. West’s colouring’ (XVIII:138). Keats’s view on the painting comes very close:

It is a wonderful picture, when West’s age is considered; But there is nothing to be intense upon; no women one feels mad to kiss; no face swelling into reality. the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth – Examine King Lear & you will find this examplified throughout; but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness – (KL I:192)

What Keats has complained of in the painting is also its deficiency of ‘the terrible sublime’ the advertisement has falsely claimed for it. Further, both Keats and Hazlitt have emphasized an almost magical, dynamic force which invigorates the object with life, by rendering an intense experience of it in its most characteristic capacity. This force derives from the artist but is powerful enough to pass on not only to the object but to the spectator. Hazlitt calls the force ‘gusto’, while Keats describes such a quality in art as ‘intensity’. By ‘gusto’, Hazlitt means ‘power or passion defining any object’:

[T]here is hardly any object entirely devoid of expression, without some character of power belonging to it, some precise association with pleasure or pain: and it is in giving this truth of character from the truth of feeling, whether in the highest or the lowest degree, but always in the highest degree of which the subject is capable, that gusto consists. (IV:77)

What is original about this signature phrase of Hazlitt’s is that he turns it from the quality of the critic into that of the artist and his artistic object. Hazlitt first gives the premise, that every object has a ‘truth of character’, which is emphasized to be dynamic as the distinctive ‘character of power’, for it is foremost emotional, subjected to pleasure or pain in different degrees the gradation of which in turn characterizes it. The task of the artist is to discern this ‘truth of character’, and this ability stems from his emotional capacity, ‘the truth of feeling’, which is essentially a sympathetic imagination that enables him to enter into the emotional existence of his object and to find out the ‘highest degree’ it is emotionally capable of. Such an emotional interaction produces a magnetism between the artist, his object and the spectator, and gusto is the maximum energy that can be generated in this interaction. When Keats writes that ‘The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute’ (KL I:387) whereas the camelion poet has none, he is expressing a similar thought: that the camelion poet needs to ‘continually’ transfigure himself into these ‘creatures of impulse’, so as to bring out their respective ‘truth of character’.

West’s painting wants gusto, in that it fails to render the truth of the character of Death, but only gives it a form, a form that, Hazlitt satirizes, ‘would cut a figure in an undertaker’s shop’ (XVIII:138) but does not have the essence to ‘kill by a look’ or ‘wither by a touch’. In Keats’s terms, it lacks intensity, so that its unpleasantness remains stagnant, dwelling on itself without being transformed into its opposite, ‘Beauty & Truth’, thus having in it ‘n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Anatomy of Negative Capability
• Chapter 1: Genealogy of Negative Capability
• Chapter 2: King Lear and Negative Capability
• Chapter 3: Negative Capability and Keats’s Poetry
• Chapter 4: Modernist Heritage of Negative Capability
• Conclusion: The Tradition of Negative Capability
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index