Romanticism and John Keats (negative capability)

Romanticism 

As my entrie will be focused on the poet John Keats, who belongs to the second generation of the Romantic poets, I believe it's pertinent to first have a look to the context of that period, Romanticism.

“Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion, Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789”.

With the Romantic a change in the concept of literature happened; they changed the character of literature. Hence, the objective of literature is more straight: use of literature to get better diction, to get more culture, and so on. Moreover, thanks to the Romantic we connect literature with imagination.

On the other hand, there was a consequent development of mass production.The economy was essentially agricultural but with the creation of industry there were huge movements of populations from these areas (rural ones) that started going to urban areas, which demanded a growing also in commerce. Moreover, there was a huge gap between the entrepeneur and the workers.The millionaires arise as a new social class and start to displace the aristocracy as the ruler class. Furthermore, workers needed to live near where they worked, therefore the city became overcrowded and the aristocracy started selling their houses and moving outside. All these led to the richer getting richer and the poorer getting poorer, and the indifference of the ruler classes.

Even in the 17^th century there was still the chain of beings, but as scientists started growing and religion was being discredited, there were a lot of people that started to think that it was possible to change that, and the middle class started growing. What's more, there was the crisis of textiles and also the closing of commons. There was anger in London, but in addition to this, there was the American Independence war, plus the French revolution (people revealing). All these fed people's ideas and the neccessity of change. Poor people started thinking that it was possible to change something. But that wasn't enough because people realized that they could take over, and nothing miraculous would happen. The french revolutionary young people started decline since after the revolution the regime of terror came, and they began to behead people in France. By the same token, London authorities were aware of the Independence War and French revolution, and they started taking measures in order to repress people, for instance public manifestations were banned. Therefore, the energy of revolution went to a place in which there was no censorship: poetry. Poets adopted new roles, in which they expressed this liberty, anxiety or eggearness, in order to show their discontent, but in an indirect way. The English Romantic poets reacted to the city, its poverty and pollution, and they started to write about nature, and the utopian countryside. Nature becames the place where poets could be closer to divinity (God or beauty). Nature was connected to simplicity.

To be a Romantic meant to be against of the age of reason, the enlightment, since this period had to do with reason governing nature and human nature. Reason was valued over imagination. People were basically good, and a perfect society was possible but required freedom. Social was valued over personal/individual. Order, harmony, balance, and tradition. And finally, influenced Classical period in classical music. By opposition, Romantic poets and writers believed that poetry should be motivated  by human creativity, not artificial, but one set of imagination and sensitivity. Men became a central being with endless possibilities. What they were trying to say was that literature was not ornamental nor artificial, or an instrument, or a product. Since imagination was very important and men have the ability to create, this led to start questioning about what was real or not.The boundary between imagination and reality became more and more fragile.

Now, it's time to move on to Keats, who was like the Hemingway of the Romantics. In the medicine school he discovered  he was into beauty and decided to be a poet and wrote revolutionary poetry that were intellectual. He wrote about feelings and pure emotions. Moreover, he was poor, and he moved to Rome to live in a better place with better weather. He died at the age of 26 because of the tuberculosis, far from his love.

Abandon the sensations and get to the other side of the wall

His conception of poetry

Keats believed in the pleasure of the physical. Sensation is the key for Keats, through sensation you can capture the essence, while you get to the essence you are part of this special energy, and through getting in contact with this energy, you are able to get apprehend, its an absolute feeling. You just feel the thing, you experience the beauty. Hence, through this you get to the absolute true.

Reality

We take for reality what we see, but it is not reality: it is the shadow. And the shadow is the reality. We do not have access to the real, we can just guess what the real is. We reconstruct what we see, what is beyond. Keats believed in the idea that we can, through poetry, create a bridge or a whole in the wall and have a look at absolutes. I found two definitions for the word “absolute” that caught my attention: 1) “Viewed or existing independently and not in relation to other things; not relative or comparative”. 2) “A value or principle which is regarded as universally valid or which may be viewed without relation to other things”. So,  what I personally think that Keats was trying to claim is that we can see and feel imagination as a power to build a vision of a transcendent or perfect/ ideal beauty. Or as a power which takes account of reality but changes it into a more difficult and comprehensive vision of beauty. I consider that many of Keats poems examine the ability of the imagination, in order to set up a transcendent vision of endless beauty.

Negative capability

Moving on, according to Keats, the poem has an element of absolute, and I experience beauty, hence we can experience an absolute, but for that we have to create new instruments, a re-interpretation with the universe; we have to re-evaluate our attitute towards pleasure (Reason prevents pleasure to have its transcendent).So, to get to the other side of the wall we have to develop the negative capability, which is the ability to abstract ourselves from thinking (thoughts) into the total experience of the sensations. Ex: when you take a bath, or when you are kissing someone, you are not thinking about that, you are just kissing. In that moment you are showing negative capability because you are abstracting yourself and enjoying the moment through sensations, and experiencing the absolute pleasure. That kiss transcends, that kiss is definable. Negative capability should allows the reader to abandon him/herself to the sensations and to get to the other side of the wall.

Keats first coined the term "Negative Capability" in his discussion of the qualities of "Man of Achievement" in one of his letters to his brothers George and Thomas Keats dated in 22nd December 1817: “I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration”.

I find myself in accord with what Keats says about negative capability, and I really appreciate his point of view because it's something that I haven't experienced so far. They way in which it was explained by the teacher, and the examples that he used, plus all the information that I read about this interesting concept made me realized how important is to, sometimes, get to the other side of the wall. I quote: “To reach negative capability, the poet must go through three steps, i.e., annihilating his identity, unified with the object; hence, getting the ability to explore the eternal beauty and truth implied in them”. What I understood about this, and I may be wrong, is that we have to destroy our identity, that is consolidated with the object, and then we can explore an imaginatively discerned reality which goes beyond the ephemerality or the transience of the world.

All things considered, I definitely think that Romanticism changed people's faith, that was no longer in reason, but a faith in imagination, senses, and feelings. A change that also meant interest in the rural and natural. What's more, poetry became more abstract, more subjective. And finally, an important matter were the mysterious and infinite. 
To finalize, as a personal view, I prefer to live in a world where sensations predominate rather than thoughts. As much as I can remember experiencing something that took me to the other side of the wall, I can't. I'm always thinking and reasoning situations that perhaps would've been better experiencing it with the negative capability. I believe that now it's more difficult to actually experience this journey. We are surrounded by more and more technology everyday that limit us from thinking in other things. So, it's pretty much complex to leave our cellphone aside and get involve in this journey through sensations in its fullness. Once in a while it's of great importance to notice that good things doesn't require money or an exact hour. You have the chance to live it any time, any moment.

Bibliographical sources

• http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm
• http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/absolute
• http://www.mrbauld.com/negcap.html
• http://www.iasj.net/iasj?func=fulltext&aId=50581