Who coined the term 'negative capability'?

John Keats coined the term “negative capability.” He first used it in a private letter to his brothers, George and Thomas, dated 22 December 1817, while describing the quality he believed marked Shakespeare and other great writers.

For Keats, negative capability meant remaining “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” without impatiently forcing every experience into a neat explanation. He valued imaginative openness and artistic perception over what he called “consecutive reasoning”—the urge to reach a definitive intellectual conclusion.

The idea is closely associated with Romantic poetry, but Keats did not develop it as a formal philosophical system. Instead, it appeared briefly in his correspondence and was later interpreted by critics as a theory of artistic empathy, creative uncertainty, and the poet’s ability to inhabit perspectives other than their own.

A common mix-up is attributing the phrase to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom Keats actually criticized in the same letter for being unable to remain content with partial knowledge. The term became widely known only after Keats’s letters were collected and published.