Negative Capability - Other Mentions of The Term

Other Mentions of The Term

• Negative capability has been seen as feeding into the displaced subject of modernism - as contributing to what Baudelaire described as 'an ego athirst for the non-ego...a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes".

• In the 1930s, the American philosopher John Dewey cited Keatsian negative capability as having influenced his own philosophical pragmatism, and said of Keats' letter that it "contains more of the psychology of productive thought than many treatises".

• The title of Nathan Scott's book Negative capability; studies in the new literature and the religious situation was inspired by Keats,

• Using a metaphor from the Eastern Front in WW II, Ted Hughes considered negative capability to be what enables verse to continue to function in spite of mud.