Poem of the Day: ‘What the Thrush Said’

The youngest and shortest-lived of the English Romantic poets, John Keats (1795-1821) began training as a doctor but abandoned his studies to pursue poetry as a singular calling. The phrase negative capability originates with Keats, who was fascinated by the possibility of knowledge attained not through philosophical reasoning, but through the extrarational apprehension of beauty in art or nature. It is this sense of sublime understanding, beyond the bounds of reason, which the thrush of the unrhymed sonnet here articulates for the human listener.