Objective Correlative
Dissociation of
Sensibility- a phrase coined by T.S.Eliot in an essay entitled The
Metaphysical Poets (1921) to describe,
Something that happened
to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury
and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the
intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson
and Browning are poets and they think, but they do not feel their thought as
immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience, it
modifies his sensibility.
According to Eliot,
In
the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in from which we have
never recovered.
The term ‘dissociation
of sensibility’ stands generally for the separation of feeling from thinking,
intellect from passion. This takes place specially when one feature or quality
in a poem is emphasised and refined at the cost of the other or in other words when
only one aspect of sensibility is exercised and the other aspect is completely
neglected. It also points to the imbalance between the refinement of language
and the degree of feeling; fancy and the matter of fact; the auditory and the
visual. He suggests that by an increasing refinement of language accompanied by
an increasing crudity of feeling, thought gets separated from feeling.
In the essay, Eliot
begins by pointing out that it is extremely difficult to define
metaphysical poetry. There are marked individual differences among the
poets of the period. One of the devices characteristic among them is
dissociation of sensibility. His essay played an important role in
rehabilitating the Metaphysical poets. Many contemporary critics agreed with
his theory of ‘dissociation of sensibility’. Cleanth Brook suggested that
Hobbes was responsible for this dissociation, while L.C.Knights suggests that
we should go further back in time, it is there in Bacon.
According to Frank Kermode,
we find dissociation however far back; he doubts whether such a split ever
occurred. He expresses his objection to Eliot’s theory in a very persuasive
manner in his essay Dissociation of Sensibility: Modern Symbolist
Readings of Literary History. A
golden age of unified sensibility never existed. Nostalgia for the golden past
is found in all literatures. Eliot suggests that this dissociation happened
around the time of English Civil War. But Kermode finds that,
However far back one
goes, one seems to find the symptoms of
dissociation- there is little historical propriety in treating it as a
seventeenth century event. ‘
Moreover, Kermode
feels that this theory was invented only to give weight to the imagist theory
of aesthetics. In spite of these criticisms Eliot’s theory
dissociation of sensibility is undoubtedly one of the most
significant contributions to critical analysis.
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