Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Unification Sensibility
Unification Sensibility
The theory of dissociation of sensibility rests largely upon Eliot’s description of the disparity in
style that exists between the metaphysical poets of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century
and the poets of the late seventeenth century onward. In “The Metaphysical Poets,” Eliot claims
that the earlier grouping of poets was “constantly amalgamating disparate experience” and thus
expressing their thoughts through the experience of feeling, while the later poets did not unite
their thoughts with their emotive experiences and therefore expressed thought separately from
feeling. He explains that the dissociation of sensibility is the reason for the “difference between
the intellectual and the reflective poet.” The earlier intellectual poet, Eliot writes, “possessed a
mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience.” When the dissociation of
sensibility occurred, “the poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought
and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected.” Thus, dissociation of sensibility is the point at which
and the manner by which this change in poetic method and style occurred; it is defined by Eliot
as the loss of sensation united with thought.
Eliot uses John Donne’s poetry as the most prominent example of united sensibility and thought.
He writes, “a thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.” Eliot’s apparent
appreciation of Donne’s ability to unify intellectual thought and the sensation of feeling
demonstrates that he believes dissociation of sensibility to be a hindrance in the progression of
poetry. Eliot asserts that despite the progress of refined language, the separation between thought
and emotion led to the end of an era of poetry that was “more mature” and that would “wear
better” than the poetry that followed.
Eliot, later on in his career, was challenged with the thought that the dissociation within literature
had been caused by the English Civil War in the mid-17th century. He did not agree or disagree
to this theory but rather stated, ‘cryptically that he thought it might have been caused by the same
factors as those which brought about the Civil War’.
IN SHORT:
By ‘Unification of sensibility’, T. S. Eliot means ‘a fusion of thought and feeling’, ‘are creation
of thought into feeling’, and ‘a direct sensuous apprehension of thought’. He argued that the
Metaphysical poets, together with the, with the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists had a
mechanism of sensibility which could accommodate any kind of experience. Eliot points out to
Donne's most successful and characteristic effect secured by brief words and sudden contrasts ---
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone ---- where the most powerful effect is produced by the
sudden contrast of associations of 'bright hair' and of 'bone'… This telescoping of images and
multiplied associations were characteristic of some of the dramatists of the period Shakespeare,
Middleton and Webster, and is one of the sources of the vitality of their language. He further
states that the poets of the seventeenth century (up to the Revolution) were the direct and normal
development of the precedent age.