Dissociation Of Sensibility.
Eliot in his influential essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ distinguished between the intellectual poetry of Donne and the reflective poetry of Tennyson in defining the essence of the new and difficult manner. In a famous phrase dissociation of sensibility, Eliot suggested that English poetry since the 17th century had suffered from a failure to fuse thought and feeling idea and sensation into, a unified expression of ‘disparate experience’. As an example Eliot notes that 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 an experience, it modified his sensibility.
Dissociation of sensibility aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century Milton and Dryden. Each of these men performed certain poetic functions so magnificently well that the magnitude of the effect concealed the absence of others. The language went on and in, some respect improved the best verse of Collins, Gray, Johnson and even Goldsmith satisfies some of the fastidious demands better than that of Donne or Marvel. But while the language became more refined. The feeling became more crude. The feeling, the sensibility expressed in Gray’s Country Churchyard is cruder than that in Marvell’s Coy Mistress.
There was another effect of the influence of Milton and Dryden, and effect which was indirect and which manifested itself at a later date. Early in the 18th century there was a reaction against the intellectual and ratio . The pendulum swam to the other extreme and the poets thought and felt by Fitz and Starks. They lacked a balance and they reflected. By reflection Eliot means that they mused meditative politically. They enjoyed the luxury of dwelling upon some feeling but couldn't express that feeling poetically. In some passages of Shelly’s Triumph Of Life and Keat’s second Hyperion. There is a struggle towards unification of sensibility but Shelly and Keats died young and their successor Tennyson and Browning could only reflect. They mediated upon their experiences poetically but failed to turn them into poetry. The metaphysical poets certainly had their faults but they expressed feeling in appropriate words and imagery. They had unified sensibility and they could find verbal equivalents for it. They were therefore more mature and better than later poets.
Association Of Sensibility.
The metaphysical poet of the 17th century influenced Eliot and he feels that it was in the metaphysical poetry that one could find a unification of sensibility, Eliot meant a synthetic faculty which can amalgamate and write through an feelings which can fuse into a single hole the varied and desperate, often opposite and contradictory experience. Eliot also argued that the metaphysical poets together with the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatist had a mechanism of sensibility which could accommodate any kind of experience. Eliot points out to Donne’s most successful and characteristic effects secured by brief words and sudden contrast example a sudden bracelet of bright hair about the bone, where the most powerful effect is produced by the sudden contrast of association of bright hair and bone. Metaphysical poets also uses the device the development of an image through various or rapid association of thought, requiring considerable agility on the part of the readers. Example : In Donne’s poem, ‘A valediction Of Weeping’, we get three separate images, the picture of the geographer’s globe, the tears of the poets beloved and the picture of the great flood. Though these pictures are entirely separates, the poet has unified them by stressing the likeness between his lady’s tears and the globe and further that they are capable of overflowing the earth.
On a round ball
A workman that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afric, and an Asia,
And quickly make that, which was nothing, all;
So doth each tear
Which thee doth wear,
A globe, yea world, by that impression grow,
Till thy tears mix'd with mine do overflow
This world; by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.
These rich images and multiplied associations were characteristics of some of the dramatist of the period of Shakespeare, Middleton and Webster and is one of the source of the vitality of their language.
