Intellectuals have a compulsion to be right and this urge is inimical to what John Keats called " negative capability, " the capacity a poem or novel must have to keep afloat a thousand contradictory people and questions in order to create the parallel universe of art.
32.
In each case, Keats found a mind which was a narrow private path, not a " thoroughfare for all thoughts . " Lacking for Keats were the central and indispensable qualities requisite for flexibility and openness to the world, or what he referred to as negative capability.
33.
In this way, the poems as a group capture Keats's philosophy of negative capability, the concept of living with unreconciled contradictory views, by trying to reconcile Keats's desire to write poetry and his inability to do so by abandoning poetry altogether and accepting life as it is.
34.
On the other hand, Donald opined in his 1996 biography that Lincoln was distinctly endowed with the personality trait of negative capability, defined by the poet John Keats and attributed to extraordinary leaders who were " content in the midst of uncertainties and doubts, and not compelled toward fact or reason ".
35.
He wrote the introduction to " The Selected Letters of John Keats " ( 1951 ), in which he defended Keats s notion of negative capability, as well as the introduction, George Orwell and the Politics of Truth, " to the 1952 reissue of George Orwell s " Homage to Catalonia ".
36.
Unger employs the concept of negative capability to describe the quality of freedom that emerges from liberating ourselves from rigid roles and hierarchies that compose part of society's formative contexts, and notes that one limitation on remaking contexts is the difficulty of combining institutions embodying different levels of negative cability into a single context.
37.
In an extraordinary act of artistic self-sacrifice, of negative capability, Santayana sets Oliver free to achieve his own destiny on his own terms and allows us as readers, especially those of us who are American, to experience the pity and terror of contemplating a young man caught in our own spiritual predicament, who goes to his death with the predicament unresolved ."
