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ABOVE:
"P" from the abecedarium "Draft CX : Primer" by Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Reprinted by permission; © by DuPlessis, 2023. All rights reserved.
“... 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” (John Keats, December 1817).
Radical poets insist that the state of mind in Negative Capability (his “enormously useful idea,”—Rachel Blau DuPlessis) must be understood in terms of and related to its outcome in the world, and in poetry itself. The poet of these poems writes not out of ordinary consciousness but in a heightened state of connection to life first as motion and second as participating in the present; the poet is anything but disinterested but immersed in the reality that includes the poem. As the Swedish poet Gunnar Harding put it, with reference to Negative Capability: “But uncertainty too can be a poetic method: to try to find your way from something you merely sense to something you don’t yet understand.” In contrast to the conventional notion of disinterestedness towards, usually interpreted as distance-from, an object, required in Negative Capability, the poet Charles Olson said, ““I do better to stay in the condition of things. No matter what it amounts to, mystery confusion doubt, it has a power. It is what I mean by Negative Capability.” Olson’s contemporary Robert Duncan, a self-acknowledged twentieth-century Romantic, brings the mind of the poet and the poem itself into necessary conjunction: “With the Romantic movement, the intellectual adventure of not knowing, of “Negative Capability,” Keats called it in poetry, returns. The truth we know is not of What Is, but of What Is Happening.” “For [Robert] Duncan, ‘a poem moves’ when the poet begins ‘to feel the pattern’ of ideas and images release ‘the patterning they are true to, the melody they belong to. Once this feeling of a patterning begins, the work comes to one’s hand; the form of the whole can be felt emerging in the fittingness of each passage’. When this happens he finds he is ‘no long thinking or proposing ideas but working with them.” The phrase “Negative Capability,” because it acknowledges the world as a place of mystery, does not immediately predict what a poem, itself part of that world, will look like. This uncertainty of poesis stems from a perception that the poet is immersed in poem and world and is expressed through various “imperfections” in writing itself—as if “perfection” would indicate certainty that for Keats equates with acceptance of political and ideological status quo.
In his letter, the formulation of Negative Capability emerges from cultural and political critique—resistance to academic art (Benjamin West) and preference for the “low company” of the Shakespearian actor Kean to the fashionable crowd. Negative Capability in an artist grows out of a rejection of ego associate with the complacency accompanying societal success.
Uncertainty seeps into poems as out and out expression of loss of, loosening control over, form and language that mirrors the perceived existential condition. Centrally, poems of Negative Capability are unpossessable; to invoke Mallarmé’s Un Coup des Dés, they resist mastery of the conscious poet over the poem as it is composed. They show signs that they move of their own accord; they “deviate” (Hazlitt, Keats); they reflect “imperfect fit,” excesses of sounds.
What is a good poem?—Keats concludes, “This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” “Beauty,” sensuous, deep and ungraspable, arises from a capability, a discipline in letting go of the ego and its productions: a sensuous othering of the imagination on the page, the presentation, in poetry, of a gap in graspable knowledge.
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