A phrase introduced by T. S. Eliot in his essay "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921). Eliot's claim was that John Donne and the other metaphysical poets of the earlier seventeenth century, like the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, "possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience."
They manifested "a direct sensuous ap-
prehension of thought," and felt "their thought as immediately as the odour
of a rose."
It refers to the way in which intellectual thought was separated from the experience of feeling in seventeenth century poetry.
But "in the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in,from which we have never recovered." This dissociation of intellectual from emotion and sensuous perception, according to Eliot.
It was greatly aggravated by the influence of John Milton and John Dryden; and most later poets in
English either thought or felt, but did not think and feel as an act of unified
sensibility.
The dissociation of sensibility was taken to be the feature that weakened most poetry between Milton and the later writings of W. B. Yeats, and was attributed particularly to the development, in the seventeenth century, of the scientific conception of reality as a material universe stripped of human values and feeling.
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