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T. S. Eliot

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The meaning of T. S. Eliot's term "dissociation of sensibility."

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T. S. Eliot's term "dissociation of sensibility" refers to the separation of thought and feeling in poetry. He argued that earlier poets, like John Donne, could blend intellect and emotion seamlessly, but later poets lost this ability, leading to a split between intellectual and emotional expression in literature.

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What is the "dissociation of sensibility" according to T. S. Eliot?

During the 17th century, according to Eliot's hypothesis, a gap opened up in Western culture between thought and feeling. This was largely a by-product of the dawning of the Age of Reason, the birth of the Scientific Revolution. Prior to this epoch, there was no such separation. Great poets, artists, and thinkers thought their feelings and felt their thoughts. This was the heyday of Christian humanism in which Christianity was combined with the insights of classical thought to provide an all-encompassing intellectual and cultural synthesis.

In relation to poetry, Eliot values the work of the Metaphysicals such as Donne because he sees it as epitomizing the fusion of intellect and feeling that characterized cultural life prior to the Age of Reason. As both a man of faith and an artist, Eliot regards the dissociation of sensibility—the separation between emotion and intellect affected by the Scientific Revolution—as a regrettable development, one...

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that instantiated a limited, positivistic, one-dimensional view of human life that failed to do justice to the complexity of man's true nature.

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The concept of the “dissociation of sensibility” is actually a theoretical position espoused by T.S. Eliot to explain why he considered Augustan and Victorian poetry in some way lacking a quality possessed in his favourite poets of the Renaissance and Jacobean periods. In “The Metaphysical Poets”, Eliot argues that before this dissociation, intellect and feeling worked in concert, with the sciences and arts integrated into the emotional life of the poet and critic rather than being parts of separate realms. This meant that the poet could integrate all facets of the world of knowledge and experience, as in Donne’s use of scientific metaphor, without being strained or artificial. One obvious flaw with Eliot’s chronology is that Tennyson, in fact, provides much of the same synthesis (e.g. the place of evolutionary theory in “In Memoriam”) as Eliot finds in Donne.

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