Abstract: John Keats’s views on poetry constitute an organic and unified theoretical system. “Negative capacity” is related to emotional languidness and cognitive delay. Such a mental state brings a “leisurely” and “peaceable” creative mood, which makes the poet’s inspiration come naturally like “leaves growing on the branches”. “The poet has no self” means that the dormancy of the poet’s emotion and cognition forces the “second self” to leave his physical body in order to “fill some other Body” and “cogitate based on its character,” and such a “filling” clearly needs to be done with the power of imagination, “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth” emphasizes the authenticity of aesthetic feeling: poetry does not need to seek truth through inferential cognitive process like philosophy, but it should insist on pursuing beauty by imagination and creating beauty through a keen sense. Keats deepened his understanding of poetry incessantly with the passage of time, but still kept it coherent and sustained a progression and cohesion between his viewpoints.

Key words: Keats, poetry, negative, self, imagination