Leaning Into the Not-Knowing

Why Keats was right about the inarticulate, the doubtful and the a-rational space of writing, and how you can work with it

You’d have to have grown up on a desert island with no library, let alone the internet, to entirely avoid the business psychology rhetoric of goal-setting, task-analysis, productivity, problem-solving and achievement that fills our mental air, not to mention a million webinars, text books and course descriptors.

And most of us sense, or have suffered from, the uncreative, tick-box narrowness that such thinking so easily becomes, and been impatient with meta-thinking-about-planning-about-making, when we could be actually making.

But even on that island you would of course be setting yourself goals, analysing the tasks involved, solving the problems that come along and, with luck, eventually settling down under your ferny roof to grill your fish or roast your tubers while the smoke signals curl up to look for the rescue helicopter.

In other words, we survive as individuals and as a species by thinking and working in that problem-solving, goal-oriented way. So why did Keats think that one of the necessities that make ‘a Man of Achievement especially in Literature’, and which Shakespeare possessed ‘so enormously’ but Coleridge lacked, was exactly the opposite of the problem-solving, task-wrangling self?

Photo by CJ Dayrit on Unsplash