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Keats: Negative Capability The Poet Welcomes The Beauty of An Object and Reproduces It Without Subjectivity
Keats: Negative Capability The Poet Welcomes The Beauty of An Object and Reproduces It Without Subjectivity
Started writing to leave a mark of his existence feeling of beauty and love intense because he knew
they will not last long beauty can give him immortality even when he’s dead poet of beauty
intensity, he knew he’d die young
La belle dame sans merci “mercy” sense of exotic and mysterious he falls in love with a femme fatale
(destroys lovers) real and ideal in conflict his ideal was perfect love and beauty and life but reality was
that he’d die young
On his grave “here lies one whose name was written water” he didn’t last enough
Who suffers has a lot to say the more you suffer the more creative you are
Unlike Byron and Shelley not interested in politics, not poet of revolution poet’s subjectivity must
disappear and write in universal negative capability = the poet welcomes the beauty of an object and
reproduces it without subjectivity represent perfect beauty
Beauty needs poet negative capability of grasping beauty and disappear completely, poet is the object of
beauty
Truth through beauty =/= decadents beauty had a moral function for Keats unlike the aesthetes
Escapist literature escape from reality because it’s unsatisfactory magic, past, supernatural