I am reminded of a related issue after reading a few
of these postings:

“The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may
partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of
the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the
more completely separate in him will be the man who
suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly
will the mind digest and transmute the passions which
are its material…”

The above passage (from his famous essay ‘Tradition
and Individual talent’) appears to me as paradoxical
whenever I think of Eliot’s phrases, ‘unified
sensibility’, and ‘dissociation of sensibility’.
Sensibility is not something cerebral.  Being
‘impersonal’ is one thing, but being two different
beings at once is another.    I have always felt
Eliot’s dramas are such fractured experiences of a
torn up personality.  Probably his conscious
conception of art had its inherent defect as displayed
by the above passage and that was one reason he could
never look with a straight eye at the works of
D.H.Lawrence.  Probably, this made Lawrence himself
sneer with disgust at the ‘bunkum of classiocity by
the Eliots, Goughs…’

--- Nancy Gish - Women's Studies <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> The Clark and Turnbull lectures explore this issue
> at great length in
> terms of the "dissociation of sensibility."
> (The are published under the title Varieties of
> Metaphysical Poetry,
> ed. Ronald Schuchard)
> Nancy
>
> On 2 Sep 2003, at 10:27, Ken Armstrong
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > At 05:36 AM 9/1/2003 -0700, you wrote:
> > >This may not be entirely germane but modern brain
> > >theory links congnition and feelings (or emotion)
> > >extremely closely.
> >
> >   So does Eliot, which surprisingly no one has
> remarked. At least, he saw
> > thinking and feeling as distinguishable but not
> separate in his dissertation.
> >
> > Ken A.


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