Word.ws English Dictionary

negative capabilities

negative capabilities is the plural of negative capability.

Meaning of negative capability

Noun

negative capability (countable and uncountable, plural negative capabilities)

  1. The capacity of artists to pursue ideals of beauty, perfection and sublimity even when it leads them into intellectual confusion and uncertainty, as opposed to a preference for philosophical certainty over artistic beauty.
    • His poetry helps me understand passion and mortality; his musings on negative capability help me understand how I can love and hate home at the same time. Negative capability, said Keats in an 1817 letter, “is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable...2010, Jeff Mann, Binding the God: Ursine Essays from the Mountain South, →ISBN, page 167

Questions about negative capabilities

What is negative capabilities the plural of?
Negative capabilities is the plural of negative capability.

Words near negative capabilities in the dictionary

  1. negative atheists
  2. negative bath
  3. negative baths
  4. negative binomial distribution
  5. negative binomial distributions
  6. negative capabilities
  7. negative capability
  8. negative clause
  9. negative clauses
  10. Negative Commerce Clause
  11. negative cost

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: negative capabilities (page history and authors); negative capability (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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