dissociation of sensibility

dissociation of sensibility, the separation of thought from feeling, which T. S. Eliot diagnosed as the weakness of English poetry from the Revolution of the 1640s until his own time. In his influential essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), Eliot argued that whereas in Donne and other pre‐Revolutionary poets ‘there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling’, from the time of Milton and Dryden ‘a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered’. This view had some influence in British and American criticism in the mid‐20th century, notably in the Cambridge school and among the New Critics, but it has frequently been challenged as a misleading simplification of literary history.