Writing into the Fog: Embracing Poetic Ambiguity through Negative Capability

In a letter written in 1817, the Romantic poet John Keats described what he saw as the rare but essential quality possessed by Shakespeare and a handful of other great writers: the capacity to dwell in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This trait, which he famously named negative capability, has since become a foundational concept in the poetic imagination. Keats’s insight gestures toward a poetic posture that resists resolution, embraces ambiguity, and allows contradiction to remain alive within the language of the poem. In a culture increasingly driven by clarity, explanation, and the pressure to "say what you mean," this idea may seem counterintuitive—even indulgent. And yet, for serious poets, negative capability remains one of the most vital tools for deepening the work.

What makes negative capability so elusive is not its intellectual difficulty, but its emotional demand. It asks the poet not to assert, but to allow; not to solve, but to inhabit. This sensibility resists the common pedagogical instinct to reward narrative closure. Instead, it values the capacity to hold two or more conflicting truths in a single frame of mind and render that tension on the page. For those developing a poetic voice, this can be disorienting. That is why writing coaching and mentorship can be so transformative: a good poetry coach doesn’t force closure but teaches the writer how to tolerate—and even honor—the ambiguity.

Take, for instance, a common experience among emerging poets: the temptation to wrap a poem up with a neat final image or insight. It’s easy to understand why. Much of our educational and communicative culture trains us to resolve tension, to craft a “takeaway,” to reward the neat bow. But in poetry, that instinct can flatten a piece prematurely. A mentor who recognizes this can ask: What if the poem didn’t try to conclude? What if it ended on a question instead of an answer? What if your uncertainty is not the weakness of the piece, but its very subject?

Consider a poem that opens with a speaker remembering a childhood incident—let’s say a moment of near-drowning. The poet may feel obligated to turn this memory into a metaphor about survival or awakening. But a coach might instead encourage the writer to stay in the sensation: the blur of water, the confusion of limbs, the eerie quiet beneath the surface. What emerges from this suggestion is atmosphere, tone, and emotional pressure. The poem doesn’t resolve into a moral. It dwells in mystery. It trusts the reader to feel without explanation.

This is the heart of negative capability: resisting the urge to tie the poem’s emotional charge to a clean narrative arc. And it’s not simply about being vague. Ambiguity in poetry is not carelessness or evasion. It is a deliberate and precise attention to complexity. A good writing coach helps the poet distinguish between lazy obscurity and generative mystery. They may ask questions that push the poet beyond what they already know. What happens if we remove this line that tells the reader what to feel? What if the metaphor stays fractured, unresolved? What does the poem gain if it refuses to answer its own question?

The history of poetry is filled with writers who practiced this art of ambiguity. Emily Dickinson’s elliptical syntax, for instance, often leaves poems suspended in possibility, their meanings shimmering rather than fixed. In “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –”, the mundane image of a fly disrupts a solemn meditation on death, refusing transcendence in favor of something more uncanny. A coach working with a poet inspired by Dickinson might ask: Is there a fly in your own poem—a disruptive detail that cracks open your idea of what the poem is "about"?

Similarly, poets like Wallace Stevens, H.D., or more recently, Louise Glück and Carl Phillips, create rich textures of thought that circle around rather than drive through a central meaning. These poets do not forfeit control of their language—in fact, their ambiguity is often the result of exquisite attention to precision. This is another aspect a writing coach can nurture: the paradox that cultivating ambiguity often requires more, not less, linguistic control. A coach might return to a draft and say: these lines are gesturing toward something unstable and powerful—let’s strip away what gets in the way of that instability.

Importantly, negative capability is not just a literary idea; it is also a psychological stance. It requires the poet to accept discomfort. To write something that resists meaning and not panic about whether the reader will “get it.” Many poets, especially early in their careers, seek reassurance that their intentions are legible. A coach plays a key role here—not by resolving the uncertainty, but by validating the poetic instinct to let that uncertainty breathe. “Yes,” the mentor might say, “this poem doesn’t know what it thinks yet. But that’s exactly where its energy is.” Such encouragement gives the poet the courage to stay in that liminal space longer, to revise not toward answers but toward deeper questions.

In a time when much discourse is flattened into declarations or polarities, poetry remains one of the few remaining forms where contradiction is not just allowed—it is necessary. The world is ambiguous. So is the self. So is language. A poet who cultivates negative capability is one who makes a home in that ambiguity, whose work does not assert mastery over meaning but instead opens the door to a more honest encounter with it.

Coaching helps make that encounter less frightening. It provides not answers, but companionship. The coach doesn’t tell the poet what the poem should mean; they sit beside them and ask what it might mean if we stopped trying so hard to be sure. They help the poet embrace nuance, suggestion, and tension as core elements of voice—not as obstacles to be overcome, but as truths to be explored.

In that sense, writing coaching is not just a tool for technical improvement—it’s a practice of philosophical permission. A good mentor hands the poet a lamp and says, “You don’t have to see the end of the path. Just walk slowly. Write into the fog. That’s where the poem lives.”