Keats's Way of Salvation (John Keats‪)‬

Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.--Leon Bloy (1) KEATS WAS AN INVETERATE SEARCHER AFTER TRUTH RATHER THAN ONE who ever felt he had a firm grasp of it. As he wrote to Benjamin Bailey, "I have not one Idea of the truth of any of my speculations." (2) He lived, if any poet ever did, in "Negative Capability"--in "uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason" (Letters 1: 193). For all this, though, he never stopped searching; just weeks after his remark to Bailey he wrote to his publisher: "I find I can have no enjoyment in the World but continual drinking of Knowledge" (Letters I: 271). As Dennis Haskell writes, "like all poets he was implicitly concerned with questions of truth. Unlike most poets he was also often explicitly concerned with the question of truth." (3)