The Theory Of Moral Sentiments By John Keats

When Keats says the poet of negative capability is “informing” and “filling some other Body,” he sounds as if directly quoting from Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. “By the imagination . . . we enter as it were into his body, and become . . . the same person with him, and thence form some idea of sensations.” This is from Smith (11), but it can be put into Keats’s mouth without a great stretch of imagination. The only significant modifications in Keats’s portrait of the ideal poet, the epitome of sympathetic identification, are the ease, delight, and above all, the intensity with which the poet performs the act. Filling other bodies through sympathetic imagination/negative capability, he “lives in gusto,” Keats writes (Kinnaird, 1977, …show more content…
The difference between the two is to represent himself as the spectator in the theatre of sympathy, Keats imagines himself as a negatively capable poet more in the image of the actor. Keats’s construction of his poetic self-image as the actor is largely attributable to the fact that his ideal of negative capability, while a major manifestation of Smithian sympathy, is strongly inflected by the figure of Shakespeare, who was revered as the supreme embodiment of sympathetic identification in the popular imagination from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Elizabeth Montagu writes in her 1769 treatise on the bard as “Shakespeare seems to have had the art to throw… his soul into the body of another man, and be at once possessed of his sentiments, adopt his passions, and rise to all the functions and feelings of his …show more content…
Keats himself has often been compared to Shakespeare. In “Jane Austen and John Keats: Negative Capability, Romance and Reality,” Walter Savage Landor claimed that Keats "had something of Shakespeare in him"(85) Matthew Arnold wrote that "No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating happiness of Keats, his perfection of loveliness," and after quoting Keats's declaration that he believed he would "be among the English Poets after my death,” Arnold declared, "He is with Shakespeare" (Beth, 2006, p. 86). Later in the twentieth century, David Perkins found evidence of the same negative capability Keats admired in Shakespeare in the poet's own writing. The “camelion poet” passage reveals that Keats rides on the cocktail of Shakespeare, subtly insinuating that in his negatively capable self as everything and nothing or nothing yet everything, he is the true successor of this poet of sympathetic imagination par excellence, the adoration for whom reached such a pitch in the eighteenth century as to engender the term “Shakespeare idolatry.” Keats the actor or enactor of negative capability is everything in his sympathetic identification and nothing in his own self, but he is also something else, a something. As to the poetical character, Keats writes in the “camelion poet” letter, “I mean