Disassociation of Sensibility

 

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Disassociation of Sensibility  [/alert-primary]

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    T.S. Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets" introduced the term "DISSOCIATION OF SENSIBILITY" to literary criticism (1921). According to Eliot, the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists and the early seventeenth-century metaphysical poets both "possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience." They demonstrated "They had "a direct sensual apprehension of thought," and they could smell a rose immediately when they were thinking it. Donne regarded a thought as an experience that altered his sensibilities." However, "a dissociation of sensibility set in in the seventeenth century, from which we have never recovered." Milton and Dryden's influence greatly exacerbated this dissociation, and most later English poets either thought or felt but did not think and feel as an act of unified sensibility.
        The alleged division between the unified mind and sensibility and the dissociated mind and sensibility was greatly expanded by Eliot's ill-defined distinction, and it was attributed to many causes, but particularly to the rise of the scientific view of the world as a material universe devoid of human values and emotion in the seventeenth century.
        However, Eliot's doctrine of a sudden but persistent dissociation of sensibility has come under heavy fire, particularly since 1950. This is because it is seen as an unreal view of intellectual and poetic history that was created to support Eliot's disapproval of the direction that English history had taken after the Civil War of 1642 and to support Eliot's specific poetic preferences.