T.S. Eliot’s Dissociation of
sensibility, supported by P.B.:
The Phrase ‘dissociation of sensibility’
occurs in Eliot’s essay on ‘The Metaphysical Poets’. He uses
this phrase to describe the characteristic fault of the later 17th
century poetry. The opposite of this phrase which Eliot has used is ‘unification
of sensibility’. According to Eliot, unification of sensibility
produces good poetry and the cause of bad poetry is dissociation of sensibility.
It is
to be kept in mind that in the criticism of Eliot, the relation of intellect
and emotion in art and poetry is of fundamental importance. The excellence of
the artistic performance of the poet depends on the intensity of his
sensibility. A poem is ‘the emotional equivalent of thought’.
Thus this fusion of thought and emotion is essential to poem creation. When this
happens, the result is good poetry. The poet should have unified sensibility
and should be able to transform his thoughts into feelings. This fusion of
intellect and emotions is to be found in the metaphysical poets and also in the
later Elizabethan and early Jacobean dramatists and poets. This mode of feeling
was directly and freshly altered by this reading and thought.
Due to
many reasons a dissociation of sensibility set in ever since the 17th
century. Eliot depicts this fact and says, “Tennyson and Browning are poets
and they think but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour
of rose. A thought to Donne was experience as the ordinary man’s experience is
chaotic, irregular, fragmentary”.
Eliot explains the difference between the
two by the following theory: ‘The poets of the 17th century, the successes
of the dramatists of the sixteenth possessed a mechanism of sensibility which
could devour any kind of experience. They are simple, artificial, difficult or
fantastic as their predecessors were no less nor more than Dante, Guido, Cino etc.
In the 17th century a dissociation of sensibility set in from which
we have never recovered end this dissociation was aggravated by the influence of
the two most powerful poets of this century, Milton and Dryden. Each of these
men performed certain poetic functions so magnificently well that the magnitude
of the effect is concealed in the absence of others, while the language became
more refined, the feeling became more- crude. The feeling, the sensibility,
expressed in the country churchyard is crude than that in the Coy Mistress.’
Thus,
we see that when thought is transformed into feeling to steal its way into the
reader’s heart, in the result is the unification of sensibility. But when
the poet’s thought is unable to convert itself into feeling, the result is dissociation
of sensibility. Dissociation of sensibility is split between thought
and feelings. It is the cause of bad poetry. A poet may have the best ideas to
convey but they are useless and of no avail till they issue forth as feelings.
A philosopher may versify his ideas but he will remain a philosopher and not a
poet. A poet would be one who would be able to convert his ideas into feelings.