That quality, he wrote in a letter to his brothers on the winter solstice of 1817, is when a man can exist in "uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason," and because of it, for a great poet, "the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration.
Galway Kinnell ascribed this state to Walt Whitman, calling it a "certain shapelessness of personality, a peculiar power to obliterate himself and flow into some other being and speak it from within." In the text in which it was first named, its coiner describes going to see Edmund Kean play Richard III and then a walk with Charles Wentworth Dilke during which it suddenly occurred to him "what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature," a quality "possessed enormously" by Shakespeare. That quality, he wrote in a letter to his brothers on the winter solstice of 1817, is when a man can exist in "uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason," and because of it, for a great poet, "the sense of beauty overcomes every other consideration." FTP what is this two- word phrase representing the ability of a writer to efface his own consciousness coined by John Keats?
Galway Kinnell ascribed this state to Walt Whitman, calling it a "certain shapelessness of personality, a peculiar power to obliterate himself and flow into some other being and speak it from within."
{negative capability}