Word.ws English Dictionary

negative capability

negative capability noun: 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.

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
    • It also, however, contains the potential for negative capability that might help transform genocide into something generative.2011, Sidner Larson, Captured in the Middle, →ISBN, page 147

negative capability meaning in Tamil

negative capability in Tamil

எதிர்மறைச் செயலாற்றல்

Forms of negative capability

pluralnegative capabilities

Origin of negative capability

Coined by John Keats in an 1817 letter.

Questions about negative capability

What does negative capability mean?
Negative capability means 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.
What is negative capability in Tamil?
Negative capability in Tamil is எதிர்மறைச் செயலாற்றல். See Negative capability meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is negative capability?
Negative capability is a noun.
What is the plural of negative capability?
The plural of negative capability is negative capabilities.

Words near negative capability in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: negative capability (page history and authors); negative capability (Tamil Wiktionary) (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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Cite this entry: “negative capability.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/negative_capability. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.