dissociation of sensibility

dissociation of sensibility, phrase used by T.S. Eliot in the essay “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) to explain the change that occurred in English poetry after the heyday of the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century.

According to Eliot, the dissociation of sensibility was a result of the natural development of poetry after the Metaphysical poets, who had felt “their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose”; this phenomenon—the “direct sensuous apprehension of thought,” or the fusion of thought and feeling—which Eliot called a mechanism of sensibility, was lost by later poets. Eliot gave evidence of the dissociation of sensibility in the more elevated language and cruder emotions of later poets.