The Inquisitive Nature of Negative Capability in Keats’ Odes

Argument: During my research into the role of John Keats among romantic poets, I learned that common criticism at the time seemed to dismiss Keats as too emotional and ultimately nonessential. Obviously, these notions changed over time and many now consider Keats to be the quintessential romantic. I spent a lot of time developing an argument for this essay and I struggled to put my thoughts into a coherent sense of direction for the paper, but I knew that Keats’ odes were key to the idea of what made him different. The more I learned about how Keats was treated during his time, the more I became curious about why he was treated this way. Ultimately, I learned that Keats was as inquisitive as every other poet at the time, but his inquiries led him down a different path of poetic discovery. Suffering from a plethora of emotions towards tangible things like nightingales and urns, Keats eventually employed his theory of negative capability into his poetry. He did not uncover any sort of scientific answer as to what the meaning of life was. However, by relenting and giving himself over to the beauty of the mystery, Keats got closer to uncovering this eternal question than any poet from his time did.

Among John Keats’ most notable contributions to romantic poetry are his odes, specifically “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” In these odes, the anonymous speaker stands in for Keats’ own understanding of what feelings are meant to be derived from the poem’s objects. In these odes, Keats’ act of inquisitiveness links material art with abstract truths and sensations and it is this method of skeptical inquiry that develops Keats’ sense of negative capability to allow him to find comfort in the abstract rather than despair in the material.

Both of these odes speak to concepts of permanence and transience in the world. The artistic form of the urn and the poetic sense of the nightingale are permanent and eternally preserved. However, Keats is forced to reconcile the fact that he is intrinsically transient. He is able to create objects and artforms of permanence, but his own transience limits him from becoming one with them. As an attempt at reconciliation, Keats largely settles on feelings of frustration in “Ode to a Nightingale.” Speaking to the nightingale’s permanence, Keats writes, “While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad / In such an ecstasy! / Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain-” (Keats 1058). These notions of the nightingale’s timelessness continue when the bird departs, perpetually singing, as the speaker is resigned to return to the soul-crushing existing of transience. Keats exhibits this when writing, “Forlorn! the very word is like a bell / To toil me back from thee to my sole self!” (Keats 1058). The fact that the nightingale will continue singing, in an abstract sense, after the speaker departs is a form of permanence that frustrates Keats in relation to his own transience. He is severely disappointed to return to the realm of the mortal because he feels he is deprived of a beautiful facet of life to which artforms are privy. 

This establishment of timelessness in art is also present in “Ode to a Grecian Urn” when Keats pens at the outset, “Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,” (Keats 1060). However, it is Keats’ shift in tone at the end of this particular ode that creates such a disparate connection with “Nightingale.” Keats concludes “Grecian Urn” by writing, “’Beauty is truth, truth beauty’–that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Clearly, the urn is tied to ideas of timelessness and existence long after the departure of the speaker, but Keats’ concluding tone differs strongly from that of “Nightingale.” In the latter, he loathed returning to transience. In the former, Keats’ tone alters in the sense that the beauty of the urn and is satisfactory enough.

This struggle for the speaker to accept his transience, in relation to such beautiful forms of art, is developed through abstract sensory language. The element of the sensory is strongly tied to Keats’ poetry and attitudes about existence. Denise Gigante writes of this in “Keats’s Nausea,” as she refers to “Hyperion,” “the poisonous metal [Keats] consumes turns the taste experience into the ‘nauseous feel’ of existence” (Gigante 502). Essentially, Keats is associated with strong emotions that inform his opinions on poetry’s purpose. However, he is always keen on translating these affecting emotions into palpable sensory language. Focusing on each of the five senses, these odes create desirable environments of escapism. This focus is achieved through sensory language that both exudes a sense of permanence for the art forms, as well as erodes a sense of certainty that is typically associated with material items. The permanent art is filled with inaccessible contradictions in the sensory language harnessed by the speaker.

Sensory language begins as a form of poetic description for the art scenes experienced by Keats in relation to his admiration of the urn in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” However, it quickly develops into abstraction as a microcosm of how materiality can transform into the intangible. From the beginning of the poem, the urn is becomes a poetic object that is the foundation for abstraction. Keats describes the urn’s capability as one that tells, “A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:” (Keats 1060). Again, in this instance, sensory language is embraced in the use of “flowery,” a term tied to the olfactory system, before transitioning into comparative language that posits the urn as being able to tell a story even better than a poet could. This comparative language is also present when Keats writes, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter;” (Keats 1060), which is another example of how sensory language (related to hearing this time) is used to compare what the urn does better than all other art. With these olfactory and auditory examples of the urn’s capabilities, illusions of materialism shed from the object as the abstract is embraced instead, in terms of what the urn can mean to each beholder. It is an object, but the art festooned upon it sets it apart from banal materiality. By inquiring into what the urn is capable of imparting onto those who seek meaning from it, Keats embraces the abstraction derived from a tangible object. In comparison with his envy towards nightingale, Keats is instead awed by material objects in an abstract realm, which allows his frustrated demeanor to fall in favor of an accepting one. He develops a demeanor that accepts that sensations of beauty are enough to savor without the determination to marry oneself to these sensations.

In addition to comparative language, contradictory language is a crucial tool for Keats to launch himself from frustration into acceptance of the unanswerable. The first line of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,” rhymes with “Sylvan historian, who canst thus express” (Keats 1060). The language is sensory again in the sense that it grapples with the absence of sound, but the rhyme scheme exhibits an inherent contradiction in Keats’ writing. Rhyming “quietness,” a form of silence, with “express,” a verb for communication, showcases the abstractness of the urn and its sensory descriptors. As Keats inquires into the purpose of the urn, he leads himself to uncertainty. The urn is silent because it is a material object, but the story it tells in its art is full of life. Yet this rhyme from Keats does not lead into further frustration on his part. Rather, it propels him toward accepting beauty by illustrating that the urn is not meant to be fully understood. It is meant to be full of contradictions and mysteriousness. Keats does not attempt to wrestle with this and gives himself over to the unknown, allowing himself to be awed.

These sentiments continue in his final stanza as Keats pivots away from sensory language and distills his theories of existence and poetics when he writes, “When old age shall this generation waste,” (Keats 1060). Typically, youth is associated with the concept of waste and the idea of lost time, but Keats instead places the emphasis on the wasting of old age. This is emblematic of Keats’ belief about how the conclusion of one’s life can embody the idea of embracing contentment. Contrasting with the insatiable probing of his scientifically-minded contemporaries, Keats instead alludes to the notion that old age should not be wasted on attempts to answer the unanswerable. Instead, he believes old age should be a time to capitulate to mystery’s beauty and accept that what makes life meaningful is its transience

This transformation from materiality to abstractness is a crucial link in the course of Keats’ inquiring nature. In “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats is left frustrated by the abstraction of the appreciation he feels for the nightingale, but by the end of “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” his inquisitiveness has led him to attitudes of acceptance in negative capability. This theory is a crucial piece of Keats’ theories of poetics and is best described by Nathan Comfort Starr in his essay, “Negative Capability in Keats’s Diction” when he writes that it is “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Starr 59). Essentially, the ultimate goal is to cease concern over facts and accept that mysteries are inherently beautiful and do not require further inquiry. However, it is Keats’ inquisitiveness that leads him to negative capability at all. By allowing the sensory language to develop into mysteries over art forms like a nightingale’s song and a Grecian urn, Keats’ inquiries slowly slip from those that cause frustration to those that allow him beauty without a quest for certainty.

This sense of acceptance is significant for the role Keats played historically in the era of Romanticism. In The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes writes about a debate at Benjamin Haydon’s “Immortal Dinner,” “Keats joined in, agreeing that Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism” (Holmes 319). The reason Keats’ legacy looms so large is because of his divergence from his contemporaries. He was not interested in rainbows beyond their poetics because of his established contentment with the mysteries of his own existence and the world around him. This fascination with beauty is present throughout both of the aforementioned odes in that sensory language is rooted in Keats’ appreciation for the brilliance of the nightingale and the Grecian urn. However, he was curious about what gave these objects permanence and what could allow them to transcend art. Eventually, Keats’ inquiring nature gave way to a bemused acceptance that the inquiries could never be satiated. Once this acceptance of the abstract was made, he did not need to fear that his inquisitiveness was primed to destroy the beauty of something beloved by reducing it to something logical. His theories rely on contentment, but he would never have arrived there if he did not ask first.

Ultimately, “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” are more than just representations of Keats’ most significant contributions to the era of romanticism. They are also emblematic of what was special about Keats’ role in the movement. Keats certainly did not acquire the answers he searched for at the outset of his poetic and philosophical journey of inquiry, but he was able to craft reflexive art that served as development for his own theory of negative capability. Rather than continuing to probe for factual answers to his concerns, Keats separated himself from his contemporaries and allowed himself to dive into the deep end of mystery and uncertainty.

Works Cited

Gigante, Denise. “Keats’s Nausea.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 40, no. 4, Winter 2001, pp.

481-510.

Holmes, Richard. The Age of Wonder. New York: Vintage Books, 2008. Print.

Keats, John. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Romanticism: An Anthology, edited by Duncan Wu,

Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 1060.

Keats, John. “Ode to a Nightingale.” Romanticism: An Anthology, edited by Duncan Wu,

Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 1058.

Starr, Nathan Comfort. “Negative Capability in Keats’s Diction.” Keats-Shelley Journal, vol. 15,

Winter 1966, pp. 59-68.

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