This Thing Called Literature by Bennett Andrew Royle Nicholas

Author:Bennett, Andrew,Royle, Nicholas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

4. Thinking about literature can also entail not thinking.

The speaker in one of the most famous lyric poems in English, John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1820), looks longingly, even enviously, at an ancient Greek urn. The urn is so quietly, implacably beautiful, and so mysterious, he thinks. And as he sighs, or complains, or enthuses, it ‘tease[s] us out of thought’ (l.44). It overwhelms him. We might understand Keats’s speaker to be representing not only a person looking at an urn but also a person reading an artwork or poem. In which case, here is a thought: when we read a poem, or when we read a certain kind of poem, we are not so much thinking as not thinking, being teased out of thought, as well as into it. In a letter Keats calls this ‘negative capability’, the ability to remain in ‘uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ (Keats 2005, 60).

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