earticle

영어

“Dissociation of sensibility” or “unification of sensibility” indicates T. S. Eliot’s poetic ideal. “Dissociation of sensibility” and its opposite poetic state, “unification of sensibility” are two poetic concepts revealing Eliot’s critical or poetical attitude. Like the two sides of a coin, they can’t be separately discussed. Eliot used the term “dissociation of sensibility” which means the separation of thought from feeling (/sense) to characterize the poetic situation in British literature since the seventeenth century. This critical attitude of Eliot’s suggests that Eliot’s poetic ideal was the representation of “unification of sensibility” in his major poems. “Unification of sensibility” reflects Eliot’s monistic attitude, which means his disapproval of the dualistic perception of our experiences. It is noteworthy that this monistic attitude reveals the same epistemological frame as F. H. Bradley’s monistic perception of experiences. In particular, Bradley’s “immediate experience” or “feeling” in which “as yet neither any subject nor object exists” can be a key word in our understanding of the influence of his philosophy on Eliot’s poetics, because Eliot’s “unification of sensibility” and Bradley’s “immediate experience” result from the same monistic epistemology. In a respect, Eliot’s “unification of sensibility” seems to be a poetic adaptation from Bradley’s “immediate experience."