John Keats website

Negative Capability worksheet

After each quotation, add your own notes of your understanding of the concept of Negative Capability

Keats: 'When a man is capable of being in doubts, uncertanties, mysteries, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason... with a great poet, the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration'

 

Coleridge: 'I sense a sort of transfusion and transmission of conciousness to identify myself with the object'.

 

Byron: 'I embody myself with the character while I am painting it'

 

Browning 'I walk, I behold that that I can be and become anything I look at and reach an understanding'.

 

T.S.Eliot: 'The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality'.

 

Woolf: 'Mrs Ramsay looked intently until she became the things she looked upon'.

 

Atwood: 'Every artist longs for freedom of movement.. to be transported into somebody else's mind, but retaining one's own perceptions and memories'.