ABSTRACT
Mr. Eliot first used the expression ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in an essay on ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, and his last recorded comment upon theory is in his British Academy lecture on Milton. The theory of dissociation of sensibility is, in fact, the most successful version of a Symbolist attempt to explain why the modern world resists works of art that testify to poet’s special, anti-intellectual way of knowing truth. Gosse and Grierson alike saw similarity between Donne and Baudelaire, and briefly hinted at parallel between English-Jacobean and French-Symbolist which was later to prove so fertile. Ransom accepts most of Symbolist position – he calls poetry of Image ‘physical’ and poetry of discourse ‘Platonic’ – right down to the psychological theory of the artist as isolated or inhibited from action. What still prevails is the Symbolist conception of the work of art as aesthetic monad, as the product of a mode of cognition superior to, and different from, that of the sciences.
