Negative Capabilty

Keats:

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason - Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates every other consideration.

Liberal Reformer:

Irony is not the antithesis of seriousness; both of these phenomena can coexist in the same cranium. There is a cheap irony, a faux-knowingness, that is to be rejected and even despised but there is an solid and good irony, the irony of looking-in, the irony of stepping back and taking stock, the irony that leads to what John Keats called "negative capability," which is the ability to dwell in doubt and uncertainty. Our last president didn't have a trace of this ability and the country suffered for it.

Me:

What I'm missing is what the irony is here or what's the conceptual relation between the ideas of irony and negative capability.

I'd be interested in understanding that relation.

My presumptive thought is that there is no such intelligible relation, but I'm all ears and my mind's open.

I sense the notion of irony has been overused to the point of emptying it of nearly all discrete content.

I'mlooking forward to the making of the intellectual connection between irony and negative capability. I've given that point some thought. It interests me. Plus negative capability reflects part of the core, along with Keats, of my view of Shakespeare. It also froms part of the core of the way I see the world.

I, at this point at least, can't make that connection.

Me:

Still waiting for an answer from Liberal Reformer.