Irreverent Criticism of John Keats
negative capability, John Keats (1795-1821), one of the greatest Romantic poets who is often compared with Shakespeare due to his phrases charged with a great intensity of imagination, was vehemently criticized by John Gibson Lockhart in Blackwoods Magazine: ““The phrenzy of the “Poems” was bad enough in its way; but it did not alarm us half so seriously as the calm, settled, imperturbable drivelling idiocy of Endymion.” This vituperative and utterly irreverent criticism was quite unjustified. We should not forget that Keats wrote some of the greatest odes, comparable to nothing except Shakespeare’s greatest poetry . One example is the concluding lines of Ode on a Grecian Urn” ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ – that is all / you know on earth, and all ye need to know”. Keats is a Shakespearean poet due to his ‘negative capability’. Keats himself remarks about this ‘negative capability’: ” Several things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me, what quality went to ...