Negative Capability- What is Keats's message?

Hey world.

Ok, so today I'm going to tackle something a little more intense. I won't be doing a poem as usual, instead I'm going to be considering a literary term first introduced by John Keats: Negative Capability.

This is a literary and almost philosophical concept which is pretty hard to wrap your head around. I'm actually still trying to understand it myself. Keats first mentioned the idea in a letter in December 1817:

'...several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & 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 & 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.'

Essentially what he is saying is this: negative capability is the art of open mindedness. It allows you to see something without necessarily having to make sense of it, enabling you fully to appreciate what is in front of you without preconception.

The reason I say this is almost a philosphical term is because in another letter he talks of a life of 'sensations rather than thoughts'. Obviously he he is using the word ‘negative’ not in a pejorative sense, but to convey the idea that a person’s perception can be improved by what he or she does not bring to it. Crucial to literary achievement, Keats argues, is a certain passivity, a willingness to let what is mysterious or doubtful remain just that. Knowledge of a thing removes its mystery, and thus its hold on the imagination.

So if you don't fully understand something, don't try too hard to figure it out. Keats advises us to just accept what is infront of you without questioning something too deeply; otherwise we lose the sense of beauty.
I was advised to go look at a tree.
See, I've got a thing for trees. I love writing about them, drawing them, climbing them, just watching them. They have always inspired me. So I did go and look at a tree. I use my experience with trees as an example, but you can practice negative capability on anything. I was told to go look at a tree and try not to think, and mentally block the knowledge that comes creeping in with one's perception of anything. This is actually really hard to do, as the state of concentration and stillness needed to achieve this 'life of sensation rather than thought' is difficult to access in our busy modern world. I advise patience, (also, if your particular object is in a public or open space and you set about staring at it it might not look quite right, so do this somewhere relatively private).

Ordinarily, when I would look at a tree I would see branches, bark, leaves, and roots. This is the 'life of thought' Keat's talks about, and we all should aim at least to attempt the 'life of sensation' too. But this time, I tried to imagine I was an alien or something, and that I had never seen what was in front of me. I think it worked; here's what I found:

I suddenly felt very small. The tree was looming over me, dead as it looked, I still sensed life deep inside it. The trees only look dead, but their winter disguise is only that. I felt a presence there with me, I felt something, someone was right here. It almost felt like when you are standing next to friend or a loved one; a comfortable silence reigned...

-A.H 🐝