In the same letter, Keats suggests that Samuel Coleridge is unwilling to allow mystery or doubt to remain unadulterated. Instead, Keats claims that Coleridge indulges in an unrelenting search for knowledge when he should be seeking to contemplate beauty and truth (a "verisimilitude") attained serendipitously from the innermost core of mystery ("Penetralium"). Keats' intuitive experiences expose his creative genius by nullifying that which has originated from the rational mind or, as Keats so elegantly wrote, "a great poet['s]... sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration" (Keats 1). A negative capable individual is fluid and yielding, immersing himself in experiences in tandem with his own. It is a receptive and passive individual, whose self withdraws, as it allows the substance of its subject to exist within, thereby collapsing the walls that divide the poet and the other. This ability to become another gives the poet a view of life and a perception of existence equal to none. Nevertheless, it does come at an extreme personal cost. As a negative capable poet, Keats could not choose which feelings he let in while surrendering himself to the full intensity of the experiences within creatures, people, and nature. As such, he drowned himself in fear, bliss, pain, elation, desperation, awe, madness, sublimity, and distress.
My pencil and watercolor painting is my original interpretation of Keats' Letter to his Brothers, George and Thomas, portraying the role of Negative Capability in the creative process. The figure in the upper left side is the poet Keats himself. His portrait is done in pencil—the black-and-white tones contrast starkly with the colorfulness of the other sections. This dichotomy is intentional: Keats' portrait represents the poet without Negative Capability, while the colorfulness represents "being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts" that one experiences when in the state of Negative Capability (Keats 1). The transmutation from faded pencil portraiture to a faceless watercolor silhouette represents the transformation Keats undergoes when writing—he must allow himself to exist in a state of Negative Capability. To do so, he loses all of the defining characteristics of self, hence the featureless face extending from the portraiture. This poet self, the one that experiences Negative Capability, is able of "obliterat[ing] all consideration" because of his control over "the sense of Beauty" (Keats 1). Therefore, the nebula spiral at the bottom of the painting represents what one can perceive and experience when in a state of Negative Capability. Space is infinitely expanding and viewed with sublime emotions, comparable to the experience of being in a state of Negative Capability. It is my artistic rendering of Keats' contemplative state free from logical or scientific knowledge thrusting himself into the chaos of uncertainty, confusion, and paradox that reveal the depth of perception invisible to those who aspire to attain certainty. Here, the world and its moral framework are no longer relevant, giving the poet creative license to pause and exist in his characters' bodies, experiencing their full intensity and range of emotions.
Therefore, when Keats mentions that he, as the Poet, "has no Identity," this lack of identity does not have a negative connotation (Keats 2). In class, we understood the Poet to be nothing more than a vessel or mirror, which takes away from Keats. However, my focus on Negative Capability reveals a new interpretation: the Poet's lack of identity allows him to experience the state of Negative Capability, allowing him to release his creative genius. Keats can access Negative Capability only in this absence of identity, where the Poet becomes "The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women" (Keats 2) or mirrors others' identities. As such, the Poet is no longer a negative, parasitic entity but instead a state of being capable of maintaining creative tension to engage in an imaginative rendering of its subject while maintaining an openness to the subject as it reveals the truth of itself.
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