Keats’s Negative Capability And The Aesthetics Of Zen

Reflecting on the varieties of life in Shakespeare’s plays,the 19th century poet John Keats coined the term,Negative Capability,to describe the quality a true poet possesses as being "capable of being in uncertainties,mysteries,doubts,without any irritable reaching after fact and reason".Ever since the first publication of Keats’s correspondence,Negative Capability has been a major critical concern for Keatsian scholarship.Different from most of the extant studies,the present study revisits Keats’s theory of Negative Capability through the lens of Zen Buddhism.Though there’s little biographical evidence indicating Keats’s acquaintance with Zen Buddhism or even eastern thoughts in general,the term,Negative Capability,an oxymoron in itself,reminds people of the Eastern philosophy,especially Zen which features paradoxical language.Through close study of the key concepts of Zen and Negative Capability,this thesis finds there’s a significant parallelism between Negative Capability and Zen as they both advocate an inner passivity and receptivity to experience the real without preconception or egoistical reasoning.This thesis starts with a review of the critical heritage of the term,Negative Capability,and then explains some key concepts of Zen Buddhism that are important to the understanding of Negative Capability.In the framework of Zen aesthetics,Chapter Three looks into Keats’s various poetic contemplations scattered in his letters and unravels the key threads of the Negative Capability theory as the loss of self-identity,imaginativeness and artistic intensity and unity with life.Chapter Four conducts a close reading of Keats’s poem from his early experiments to the acclaimed odes.Through textual analysis,the author finds that Keats poems,from his early obsession with the richness of imagination and sensuousness to the later emphasis on the unity with life in poetry,also manifests the affinity between Keats’s poetics and Zen aesthetics.