Letters by John Keats

Last Poet of a Romantic period, John Keats' critical speculation is found in his letters, which he wrote to different persons in different walks of life. He believes in sensation rather than thought. Later he is also known as sensuous poet. He is sensuous poet because he makes use of that poetic image, which directly affects sense organs.

Keats finds truth and beauty as two aspects, which are inseparable. Beauty for him is the source of knowledge, which is beyond the reach of consecutive reasoning. By consecutive reasoning we mean the use of reason in a successive way without caring anything for other till knowledge is accomplished.

He associates life of sensation with empathic experience and says" If a sparrow comes before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel". Like Kant and Coleridge he distinguishes beautiful and agreeable or disagreeable. For him, the excellence of art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporation like in King Lear by Shakespeare. Keats' most important concern is his concept of negative capability. By negative capability Keats mean the capacity to remain in uncertainty without any struggle to reach domain of certainty and rationality. By negative capability, we furthermore mean the capacity to see death in life and life in death, pleasure in pain, pain in pleasure, beauty in ugliness and ugliness in beauty, art of life and life of art, time in eternity and eternity in time.

Additionally negative capability is that capability which creates a state in which the observer and the observed are one. The dichotomy between the subject and the object are collapse and both merge in to one. He states that poet's must able to maintain the aesthetic distance between his/her personality and the personality of the characters. In other words, negative of poet's personality is what he calls Negative capability. Actually speaking, his concept of Negative capability involves self- annihilation or disinterestedness. Keats discovers that to comprehend experience and to attain freedom from its bondage what is necessary is self- annihilation. It requires that an essential quality of a great poet is his immense capacity for sympathetic identification with some object that he considers dearer to himself. Keats believes that Wordsworth and Coleridge did not possess negative capability. Wordsworth could not annihilate the self or more precisely, the ego, for the yawning ego hinders disinterested perception and action, and leads to involvement to experience. As for Coleridge, he would let go by a fire-isolated verisimilitude caught from the penetration of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half- knowledge power change.

Keats believed that Shakespeare exemplified, to a remarkable degree, the power of self- absorption as well as wonderful sympathy and identification with variety of experience. For Keats, the necessary precondition of poetry is submission to things as they are, without trying to intellectualize them in to something else.

Keats offers a new concept of aesthetic revolution, and brings to bear upon in the rigor of abstract thinking and the sensitivity of perception. T.S Eliot's concept of objective Correlative and The Dissociation of sensibility have this precision and rigors but Keats Negative capability lacks it.

It is his speculative query rather than philosophical concept Keats has tried to create the insight in to creative psychology, which conditions the characters of a work of art. For him, Shakespeare is able to dramatize a diversity of attitude and temperaments, and his imaginative flexibility is such that in a great play like Hamlet or King Lear in which the protagonist seem to have remarkable autonym. Keats notion of negative capability undermines the complex but firm control exerted by Shakespeare. However, for Keats this concept is a new mode in Romantic critical attitude when the poets’ personality plays significant role.