NAME: MUHAMMAD AHSAN ASGHAR

REG NO: 70080503

CLASS: BSELL O (4)
SUBJECT: CLASSICAL POETRY
TEACHER: SIR KHALID MAHMOOD
 Unification of Sensibility
It was T.S. Eliot who made the phrase “unified sensibility” popular. According to Eliot, the
two faculties, that of feeling and of thinking came to be dissociated from each other on account
of one-sided emphasis placed since the time of Milton on intellect. Thus, after the seventeenth
century, we have either poetry of thought or poetry of feeling. Such a separation of thought from
feeling is called dissociation of sensibility. This had an adverse effect on the history of poetry.
But in the early part of seventeenth century feeling and thought were combined, they were one
operation of the mind. It was not possible to think without feeling and to feel without thinking.
This is called a unified sensibility (or unification of sensibility). Donne and the Metaphysicals
had a unified sensibility. Their poetry expressed through thinking and feeling at the same time.
Here is a direct apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling. Eliot tells us in
the essay Metaphysical Poets: “The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the
sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience.”
Thus, in the seventeenth century, a dissociation of sensibility set in. If the Metaphysicals are
obscure and difficult, it is because their sensibility is unified, and ours dissociated.
The Metaphysicals are constantly amalgamating disparate experiences. Donne had the knack
of presenting different objects together. These objects are quite remote though undeniable
similarity has been brought about by the poet. He connects the abstract with concrete, the
physical with spiritual, the remote with the near and the sublime with the common-place. “This
juxtaposition, and sometimes, interfusion of apparently dissimilar or exactly opposite objects
often pleasantly thrills us into a new perception of reality.” And Donne, says Hayward, is a
‘thrilling poet’:
Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one
Inconstancy naturally hath begot
A constant habit.
These “contraries” meeting in Donne’s poetry vexes not only the poet but also his readers.
His successors handled these contraries rather crudely with very unpleasant effects.

The theory of dissociation of sensibility rests largely upon Eliot’s description of the disparity in
style that exists between the metaphysical poets of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century
and the poets of the late seventeenth century onward. In “The Metaphysical Poets,” Eliot claims
that the earlier grouping of poets was “constantly amalgamating disparate experience” and thus
expressing their thoughts through the experience of feeling, while the later poets did not unite
their thoughts with their emotive experiences and therefore expressed thought separately from
feeling. He explains that the dissociation of sensibility is the reason for the “difference between
the intellectual and the reflective poet.” The earlier intellectual poet, Eliot writes, “possessed a
mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience.” When the dissociation of
sensibility occurred, “the poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought
and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected.” Thus, dissociation of sensibility is the point at which
and the manner by which this change in poetic method and style occurred; it is defined by Eliot
as the loss of sensation united with thought.
Eliot uses John Donne’s poetry as the most prominent example of united sensibility and thought.
He writes, “a thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.” Eliot’s apparent
appreciation of Donne’s ability to unify intellectual thought and the sensation of feeling
 demonstrates that he believes dissociation of sensibility to be a hindrance in the progression of
poetry. Eliot asserts that despite the progress of refined language, the separation between thought
and emotion led to the end of an era of poetry that was “more mature” and that would “wear
better” than the poetry that followed.
Eliot, later on in his career, was challenged with the thought that the dissociation within literature
had been caused by the English Civil War in the mid-17th century. He did not agree or disagree
to this theory but rather stated, ‘cryptically that he thought it might have been caused by the same
factors as those which brought about the Civil War’.

IN SHORT:
By ‘Unification of sensibility’, T. S. Eliot means ‘a fusion of thought and feeling’, ‘are creation
of thought into feeling’, and ‘a direct sensuous apprehension of thought’. He argued that the
Metaphysical poets, together with the, with the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists had a
mechanism of sensibility which could accommodate any kind of experience. Eliot points out to
Donne's most successful and characteristic effect secured by brief words and sudden contrasts ---
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone ---- where the most powerful effect is produced by the
sudden contrast of associations of 'bright hair' and of 'bone'… This telescoping of images and
multiplied associations were characteristic of some of the dramatists of the period Shakespeare,
Middleton and Webster, and is one of the sources of the vitality of their language. He further
states that the poets of the seventeenth century (up to the Revolution) were the direct and normal
development of the precedent age.