Negative Capability

First published in 1939, Walter Jackson Bate’s seminal study of John Keats’s “negative capability” remains the definitive account of one of the central ideas of Romantic poetics. At once genealogical and analytical, Bate traces the concept across a wide intellectual field―linking it to William Hazlitt’s notion of “gusto,” to William Shakespeare’s dramatic impersonality, and forward to Henri Bergson’s distinction between intellect and intuition. In Bate’s formulation, negative capability emerges as a discipline of disinterestedness and imaginative sympathy: the capacity to relinquish the self and enter fully into the reality of another.

Against the egotism and epistemic certainties of his age, Keats proposed instead a poetics grounded in openness―to “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts.” Bate’s study restores the full force of that challenge, revealing negative capability not as a passing remark but as a rigorous and enduring principle of artistic creation. This edition returns a foundational work to print, with a new introduction by the Italian poet and critic Maura Del Serra―and renews the truth of T. S. Eliot’s judgment: that there is scarcely a statement Keats made about poetry that has not proved true.

Walter Jackson Bate (1918–1999) was one of the most influential literary critics of the twentieth century. His book John Keats (1963) won the Pulitzer Prize.

Maura Del Serra (Pistoia 1948) is a poet, playwright, translator, and literary critic, formerly a comparative scholar at the University of Florence. She has published collections of poems, plays, essays, and critical works on multiple authors as well as several translations.