Relationship Between Negative Capability and Poetry

One wouldn't expect the fluidity and deep essence of poetry to derive from often alienated and clouded conditions. Today in class we were talking about how great poets have negative capability. How they have the capacity to orient themselves with fear, doubt, defeat, even disgust, and create a masterpiece out of those mental states. While reading the essay about Philip Larkin in The Modern Element, it said that Larkin "could not write without a nearly monastic isolation and routine." To me this statement completely paralleled with a poet's negative capability. Of course I can't speak for Larkin, and I do not have the title of being a "great poet," but I have definitely been capable of negative and isolated experiences when I write. Some of my most introspective thoughts come from negativity: the most familiar being that when I have a bad day or I'm feeling restless and discouraged, I try to blow off some steam by writing about it. It may not be an amazing piece of writing, but at least the bad day inspired the ability to write. It's a sad thing to say, but it is so much more easy for me to put on my pessimistic "specs" and be cynical about life rather than be "yellow" and "keep the store." I have a tendency to seclude myself into a routine continuum, and the affects of that state of being are the source of inspiration for composition. Being able to write under these conditions would not take place without the awareness that I am in isolation. The essay on Larkin also says that his greatness only came by confronting "the full implications of this bargain." What I am starting to learn is that with a disadvantage (in this case being isolation), comes an advantage--(the end product): Poetry. It seems as though poets, (and critics) have to exist simultaneously in both good and bad settings to create literature.