Page 53 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes by social theorist Roberto Unger to explain how human beings innovate and resist within confining
social contexts.

5.1.1 Keats: The Poet’s Turn of Phrase

John Keats used the term negative capability to describe the artist as one who is receptive to the world
and its natural phenomena, and to reject those who tried to formulate theories or categorize knowledge.
In a letter to his brothers on December 21, 1817 he employed negative capability to criticize Coleridge,
who he thought sought knowledge over beauty:
I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in
my mind, and at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in
literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously-I mean Negative Capability, that is
when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching
after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught
from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge.
This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this that with a great poet
the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
The origin of the term is unknown, but some scholars have hypothesized that Keats was influenced
in his studies of medicine and chemistry, and that it refers to the negative pole of an electric current
which is passive and receptive. In the same way that the negative pole receives the current from the
positive pole, the poet receives impulses from a world that is full of mystery and doubt, which
cannot be explained but which the poet can translate into art.
Although this was the only time that Keats used the term, this view of aesthetics and rejection of a
rationalizing tendency has influenced much commentary on Romanticism and the tenets of human
experience.

5.2 Renaissance of Wonder

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning
in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more
loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not uniform across
Europe, this is a general use of the term. As a cultural movement, it encompassed a flowering of
literature, science, art, religion, and politics, and a resurgence of learning based on classical sources,
the development of linear perspective in painting, and gradual but widespread educational reform.
Traditionally, this intellectual transformation has resulted in the Renaissance being viewed as a bridge
between the middle Ages and the Modern era. Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in many
intellectual pursuits, as well as social and political upheaval, it is perhaps best known for its artistic
developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who
inspired the term “Renaissance man”.
There is a consensus the Renaissance began in Florence, Tuscany in the 14th century. Various theories
have been proposed to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors
including the social and civic peculiarities of Florence at the time; its political structure; the patronage
of its dominant family, the Medici.

Define the term Renaissance.

The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and there has been much debate among
historians as to the usefulness of Renaissance as a term and as a historical delineation. Some have
called into question whether the Renaissance was a cultural “advance” from the middle Ages, instead

46 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY