Walter Jackson Bate's canonical 1939 study of Keats's concept of negative capability is a genealogical treatise that unearths the socio-political, aesthetic, and intellectual composition of Keats's most famous poetic idea. He discloses its relation to Hazlitt's idea of "gusto" and to Shakespearean notions of impersonality and intensity while also demonstrating how negative capability presages Bergson's conceptual interpretation of intellect and intuition. Bate reveals how the key elements of Keats's poetic concept are disinterestedness, sympathy, impersonality, and dramatic poetry, defining negative capability as "the ability to negate or lose one's identity in something larger than oneself - a sympathetic openness to the concrete reality without, an imaginative identification, a relishing and understanding of it." With 'negative capability,' Keats railed against the rampant egotism of his epoch and challenged the certainty of its claims to knowledge. While embracing reality, Keats urged the necessity of abiding in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts. This new edition brings back into print Bate's indispensable work and features an introduction by the distinguished Italian poet, playwright, and literary critic Maura Del Serra. With its republication, Eliot's proclamation on Keats is given new force: that "there is hardly one statement of Keats about poetry which ... will not be found to be true..."

Negative Capability: On the Intuitive Approach in Keats

Literature & Fiction

Bate, Walter Jackson

Del Serra, Maura

Essays & Correspondence

Contra Mundum Press

Maura Del Serra is a poet, playwright, translator, and essayist whose work is highly regarded in Italy and Europe where it has garnered numerous accolades. Following her anthology Coral (1994) and the critically acclaimed collections of poetry L'opera del vento (2006) and Tentativi di certezza (2010), Ladder of Oaths contains poems and other texts Del Serra composed between 2010 and 2015. Ladder of Oaths further develops and enriches the author's ars poetica -- while rooted in classical Western & Eastern traditions, Del Serra's spiral-like gaze extends from cosmo-metaphysical openings to both autobiographical & civic themes. The architectural and polytonal character of her poetry is born of more than three decades of intense and convergent activity as a writer who embodies the multiple nuclei of a thinking poetry. Entrusted to a passionate and metaphoric inventive ductus, Del Serra's work is dialogical and has a choral transitivity whose rhythms are as rigorous as her style is refined. Such is evident both in her free verse and in her haikus and aphorisms, not to speak of the vibrant, dream-like lyricism of "For Elisa," the po me en prose that closes the present collection. This is the first book of Del Serra's to be translated into English since Infinite Present in 2002.

Ladder of Oaths: Poems, Aphorisms, & Other Things

Poetry

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