John Keats (1795–1821) put forward ideas about poetry that can be borne in mind when reading the poems of Snorri Hjartarson. Snorri was much taken with Keats’s poems and drew on them in his own poetry. His original poems and his view of poetry resemble in many ways what Keats called negative capability. The poet then enters into different circumstances and avoids self-absorption, but feels with everything that breathes and tries to… sense the beauty of the world. The poet is then in the position of the one who undergoes rather than the one who acts, and uses not reasoning but an artistic and many-sided perception. Empathy and sensitivity to nature mark the poems of Keats and Snorri strongly, but they also share certain poetic methods and a poetic style, as the talk will show. Negative capability lies, among other things, in poetic uncertainty set against logical certainty, and in this way poetry can show life as it is, instead of fitting it to preconceived ideas of what it ought to be.