negative capability

negative capability, the phrase used by the English poet John Keats to describe the quality of selfless receptivity necessary to a true poet. In a letter to his brothers (December 1817), he writes

at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

He goes on to criticize Coleridge for not being ‘content with half knowledge’; and in later letters complains of the ‘egotistical’ and philosophical bias of Wordsworth's poetry. By negative capability, then, Keats seems to have meant a poetic capacity to efface one's own mental identity by immersing it sympathetically and spontaneously within the subject described, as Shakespeare was thought to have done.