Keats described a conversation he had been engaged in a few days previously:[1] I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon 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.
[2] Samuel Taylor Coleridge was, by 1817, a frequent target of criticism by the younger poets of Keats's generation, often ridiculed for his infatuation with German idealistic philosophy.
[7] Keat's concept of negative capability can be understood as an author's ability to enter fully and imaginatively into the characters, objects, and actions he represents.
[13] Negative capability could also be understood as just one of a number of moods competing in the poet's mind before a poem arrives, i.e. during the phase that may be called "prepoetry", after the musical form of the same name which delights in 'uncertainties, mysteries, [and] doubts'.
[15] One way to approach the subject could be through the words of poets themselves, e.g.: "Emotion recollected in tranquility"[16] and "wise passivity" (e.g. Wordsworth), "the systematic derangement of the senses" [17] (e.g. Rimbaud), "Automatic writing and thought transference"[18] (e.g. Yeats), and "Frenzy"[19] (e.g. Shakespeare).
[21]: 282 The twentieth-century British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion elaborated on Keats's term to illustrate an attitude of openness of mind which he considered of central importance, not only in the psychoanalytic session, but in life itself.
[22] For Bion, negative capability was the ability to tolerate the pain and confusion of not knowing, rather than imposing ready-made or omnipotent certainties upon an ambiguous situation or emotional challenge.
[25] Greek author Dimitris Lyacos has considered people living "in the margins" as possessing the negative capability that permits them to cross boundaries and, by accepting "the burden of the mystery", explore uncertainty and the flux of life against western norms and structures.
In a 2018 interview in Berfrois Magazine Lyacos noted: "We carry with us a backpack of ideas, theories, insecurities and the detailed scenarios we project onto the future.
Unlike us, outcasts, fugitives and people in the margins are the ones possessing the negative capability, the power to bear the "burden of the mystery"; immigrants cross seas that might engulf them.
Keats' man of negative capability had qualities that enabled him to "lose his self-identity, his 'imaginative identification' with and submission to things, and his power to achieve a unity with life".
The "quest" stage is accompanied by a strong feeling of uneasiness, resembling the capacity to practice negative capability while the mind is in a state of "uncertainties, mysteries and doubts".
He criticized Unger's early work as being unable to chart a route for the idea to pass into reality, which leaves history closed and the individual holding onto the concept while kicking against air.
Fish finds the capability Unger invokes in his early works unimaginable and unmanufacturable that can only be expressed outright in blatant speech, or obliquely in concept.
[29] More generally, Fish finds the idea of radical culture as an oppositional ideal in which context is continuously refined or rejected impracticable at best, and impossible at worst.
It is presented not as an idea or a theory or a concept or a thesis, but as a mood which the heroine Lyra is able to sink into, and which enables her especial ability to read the rare and beautiful and truth-telling alethiometer.
In 2013 jazz guitarist Bern Nix released an album titled Negative Capability, containing liner notes explaining Keats definition.