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Walter Jackson Bate's canonical 1939 study of Keats's concept of
negative capability is a genealogical treatise that unearths the
socio-political, aesthetic, and intellectual composition of Keats's
most famous poetic idea. He discloses its relation to Hazlitt's
idea of "gusto" and to Shakespearean notions of impersonality and
intensity while also demonstrating how negative capability presages
Bergson's conceptual interpretation of intellect and intuition.
Bate reveals how the key elements of Keats's poetic concept are
disinterestedness, sympathy, impersonality, and dramatic poetry,
defining negative capability as "the ability to negate or lose
one's identity in something larger than oneself - a sympathetic
openness to the concrete reality without, an imaginative
identification, a relishing and understanding of it." With
'negative capability, ' Keats railed against the rampant egotism of
his epoch and challenged the certainty of its claims to knowledge.
While embracing reality, Keats urged the necessity of abiding in
uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts. This new edition brings back
into print Bate's indispensable work and features an introduction
by the distinguished Italian poet, playwright, and literary critic
Maura Del Serra. With its republication, Eliot's proclamation on
Keats is given new force: that "there is hardly one statement of
Keats about poetry which ... will not be found to be true..."
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