Negative capability
A couple of weeks ago, together with friends, I visited Keats House in Hampstead. For all of the times we had been to Hampstead and walked across the Heath, or even like me, lived close by, none of us had been before. It is a delightful little house with just enough furniture, household items and personal collections to evoke the period and Keats happy but all-too-short life there. Like you, maybe, we’d studied the poetry of Keats at school but had forgotten how full of loveliness and longing it is. It was perfect timing to listen to ‘Ode to Autumn’ on one of the last glowing, sunny November days: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness…..” still hits the spot nearly 200 years after it was written. We were reminded of how dedicated Keats was to his poetry and that he gave up the life and wealth of a trained apothecary surgeon to concentrate on poetry. But the critics were not kind to him, his beloved brothers died and his young love for Fanny Brawne was doomed, thanks to lack of money and then Keats’ own ill health. His loyal friend, Charles Brown, travelled with him to Rome, in the hope that a warmer climate might help Keats recover from consumption but this was not to be. He died tragically at the age of only 25 years.
You can imagine my surprise then, only a couple of days after the visit, I was absent mindedly listening to ‘Front Row’ on BBC Radio 4, when I heard Marianne Faithfull talking about her new album ‘Negative Creativity’ and crediting dear John Keats! I had to check it out but yes, I think I can make the connection. Keats conceived and wrote about the concept of ‘negative creativity’ as prizing intuition and uncertainty above reason and knowledge. So ‘negative’ is not pejorative but conveys the idea that a person’s potential can be defined by what he or she does not possess – there is no need in this context, to be clever and work everything out. Rather, in the words of Keats, ‘with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration’. Marianne says that at her age now of 71, in her song writing she can honestly offer her own meditations on loneliness, love, death and regret, without the need to have ‘worked it all out’. Poetry indeed.