Intensity & Negative Capability Flashcards
Definition of “intensity”
“the natural impression of any object or event, by its vividness exciting a voluntary movement of imagination and passion, and producing, by sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds, expressing it”
La capacité négative
La « qualité qui contribue à former un homme accompli lorsqu’il est capable d’être dans l’incertitude, les mystères, les doutes sans courir avec irritation après le fait et la raison ».
Elle exige du poète qu’il soit réceptif à la beauté artistique, même si cela se fait au détriment de la raison et la certitude
Être un embarras, être perdu, être impuissant – trois capacités négatives, éprouvées, qu’on désapprend, qui fondent notre singularité.
Being an inconvenience, being lost, and being vulnerable. Three negative capabilities felt that we unlearn but that nevertheless constitute our singularity
dans une lettre à ses frères du 21 décembre 1817
Lettre où il parle de la capacité négative, en anglais negative capability
“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.”
lettre à J.H. Reynolds, le 19 février 1818
(cf. réceptivité totale)
“…let us not…go hurrying about and collecting honeybee-like, buzzing here and there impatiently from a knowledge of what is to be arrived at: but let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive–budding patiently under the eye of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect that favours us with a visit–sap will be given us for Meat and dew for drink.”
Qu’est-ce que Henri PEYRE veut dire par une « réceptivité totale, une ouverture presque indolente aux impressions de la nature et du monde extérieur » ?
ce don de séjourner dans le mystère et le doute sans se soucier de poursuivre faits ou raison.
Son culte des sensations, souvent proclamé, l’est moins des seules jouissances de goût ou de parfum (cependant fort intenses chez lui) que de ces intuitions de l’imagination qui ne reposent sur rien de rationnel
lettre à R. Woodhouse le 27 octobre 1818
le vrai poète n’a aucune identité ; il n’est rien et il est tout, un caméléon.
Genius or “the poetical character”:
“has no character–it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it fowl or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated–It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago or an Imogen … A Poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no Identity–he is continually inform[ing]–and filling some other body–the Sun, the Moon, the Sea, and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute–the poet has none; no identity–he is certainly the most unpoetical of all god’s creatures.”
L’identité poétique chez Keats ?
le vrai poète n’a aucune identité ; il n’est rien et il est tout, un caméléon. Il est donc le moins poétique.
(lettre du 27 octobre 1818)
lettre du 3 mai 1818
il a parlé du passage graduel d’une demeure de la pensée juvénile à d’autres logis moins radieux, dans lesquels on sent la présence de la misère humaine et on porte ce que Wordsworth appelait « le fardeau du mystère ». Il imagina un moment les Grecs comme un peuple serein, content de vivre pour la beauté. Pourtant il aperçut plus vite que Chénier ou Schiller ce qu’avait de partiel cette idéalisation
One of the main interests of Hyperion, the poem, lies in the poet’s sustained effort to recapture Milton’s sublimity of style, the power and fervour of an imagination representing vividly, or making “words tell as pictures” (William Hazlitt, “On Shakespeare and Milton”)
Thus projecting us into the very world and life of the poem, a feat suggestiveness often marvelously equalled by Keats, as, for instance in the blend of suspension and dynamic smoothness characterizing the cosmic image on which Bk. I concludes
Then with a slow incline of his broad breast
Like to a diver in the pearly seas,
Forward he stoop’d over the airy shore,
And plung’d deep into the night”
These lines are energized and voiced by intensity. They spring from the poet’s full experience of the action being described, and, with their sound reverberations, breaking up the uniformity of blank verse (cf. Milton)., the justness of their neat, forceful imagery, and the easiness of their syntactic flow, propelling us into an intense sharing of the experience.
To paraphrase Keats himself: there is much to be intense upon in these lines whose suggested meanings seem inexhaustible, and the very speechlessness that seizes the reader may be the best indication of their sublimity
– adapts Milton’s “verse-paragraph,” experimenting with syntactic possibility through complex structures organized as spaces for the elaboration of tableaux rhetorically unified around a singleness of impression, a compositional technique giving depth to poetry and weaving its language into a “tapestry empyrean” (cf. To J.H. Reynolds, 19 February 1818)
First statement on poetic intensity
Longinus in Peri hypsous (On the Sublime, 1st century C.E.), which emphasized the superiority of original genius to tradition, and of strong emotion to restraint
Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (1595)
Underlines the superiority of the poet to the philosopher on the grounds of intensity that can “strike, pierce, [or] possess the sight of the soul.”
John Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668)
Recognizes the intensity of Shakespeare’s imagery can be seen in Neander’s observation that “when he describes anything, you more than see it. You feel it too”
Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and other empirical philosophers
Challenged 18th century rationalism and emphasize the power of sensation
Edmund Burke On the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757)
Characterized the sublime as “productive of strong emotion which the mind is capable of feel” or as “producing astonishment”
