Walter Jackson Bate

First published in 1939, Walter Jackson Bate's seminal study of John Keats's negative capability remains the definitive account of one of the central ideas of Romantic poetics. At once genealogical and analytical, Bate traces the concept across a wide intellectual field—linking it to William Hazlitt's notion of "gusto," to William Shakespeare's dramatic impersonality, and forward to Henri Bergson's distinction between...