ts eliot
What according to T. S. Eliot, is ‘dissociation of sensibility’? What is his charge against Milton and Dryden in the essay on ‘The Metaphysical Poets’?
Eliot’s theory of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ may be said to be an attempt to find some kind of historical explanation to the dissolution of the tradition of unified sensibility which found its perfection in the writings of Dante and Shakespeare. The unified sensibility was a sensibility which was the product of a true synthesis of the individual with the traditional, of feeling with thought and of the temporal with the eternal.
It was not only representative of the mind of Europe but also of the traditions of European thought and culture. But unfortunately, according to Eliot, the traditions of unified sensibility were suddenly disrupted in the seventeenth century as a result of a split in the creative personality of the artist, for which he formulated his famous theory of the ‘dissociation of sensibility.’
For Eliot, as with Coleridge, poetry is a union of opposites but whereas Coleridge explains that this reconcilation of opposites is brought about by the synthetic power of the secondary imagination, Eliot replaces the words ‘secondary imagination’ by the words ‘unified sensibility’ to express the operation of the poet’s mind. Eliot assigns primacy to the poetic sensibility which for him is the basis for writing poetry.
By ‘sensibility’ Eliot does not merely mean feeling or the capacity to receive sense impression. He means much more than that. By ‘sensibility’ he means a synthetic faculty, a faculty which can amalgamate and unite thought and feeling, which can fuse into a single whole the varied and disparate, often opposite and contradictory experiences, the sensuous and the intellectual.
The great Elizabethans and early Jacobeans had developed a unified sensibility. That is why they were widely read, and their thinking and learning modified their mode of feeling. Such a fusion of thought and
Eliot’s theory of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ may be said to be an attempt to find some kind of historical explanation to the dissolution of the tradition of unified sensibility which found its perfection in the writings of Dante and Shakespeare. The unified sensibility was a sensibility which was the product of a true synthesis of the individual with the traditional, of feeling with thought and of the temporal with the eternal.
It was not only representative of the mind of Europe but also of the traditions of European thought and culture. But unfortunately, according to Eliot, the traditions of unified sensibility were suddenly disrupted in the seventeenth century as a result of a split in the creative personality of the artist, for which he formulated his famous theory of the ‘dissociation of sensibility.’
For Eliot, as with Coleridge, poetry is a union of opposites but whereas Coleridge explains that this reconcilation of opposites is brought about by the synthetic power of the secondary imagination, Eliot replaces the words ‘secondary imagination’ by the words ‘unified sensibility’ to express the operation of the poet’s mind. Eliot assigns primacy to the poetic sensibility which for him is the basis for writing poetry.
By ‘sensibility’ Eliot does not merely mean feeling or the capacity to receive sense impression. He means much more than that. By ‘sensibility’ he means a synthetic faculty, a faculty which can amalgamate and unite thought and feeling, which can fuse into a single whole the varied and disparate, often opposite and contradictory experiences, the sensuous and the intellectual.
The great Elizabethans and early Jacobeans had developed a unified sensibility. That is why they were widely read, and their thinking and learning modified their mode of feeling. Such a fusion of thought and