Keats’s Negative Sublime

Abstract

This article investigates the nature of the sublime as conceived by John Keats. With the affinity between Keats’s renowned notion of negative capability and Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophical claim of negative dialectics in mind, I suggest that Keats’s notion of the sublime is essentially negative. The paper explores how the negative sublime ultimately informs Keats’s political thoughts that would complicate and resist progressivism implied both in Enlightenment and in more conventional renderings of the sublime during the eighteenth century. The essay regards Keats’s aesthetic and poetic search for negative capability as a process, which involves his Scotland tour to the highest mountain in Great Britain and the writing of the great odes. His last ode, “To Autumn,” is shown to be the embodiment of Keats’s matured vision of negative sublime, when the poet finds complacency not in seeking progress but in recognizing the multitudinous voices without reduction, just as Adorno’s negative dialectics refuses syntheses and appreciates non-identities.