T. S.

Eliot's Theory of Dissociation

Author(s): Allen Austin
Source: College English, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Jan., 1962), pp. 309-312
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
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 ROUND
Stevens' clever shift to the formal couplets
manifests this further rape of Susanna's
freedom by those attendants unable to serve
beauty except within the stereotypes of
moral custom:
Anon, their lamps' uplifted flame
Revealed Susanna and her shame.
And then, the simpering Byzantines
Fled, with a noise like tambourines.
Their foreign rhythms once more violate
the natural.
The recapitulation turns, then, to the ab-
stract problem suggested by the little
drama, and section four becomes, in part,
a variation on the theme Stevens shortly
afterward devolped in part four of "Sun-
day Morning." The opening lines are among
Stevens' most famous:
Beauty is momentary in the mind-
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
I assume this to be essentially an anti-
Platonic statement, which like most rejec-
tions of Platonism leans heavily on what it
rejects. "Beauty is momentary in the mind"
in that any bodiless abstraction defies en-
during conception. The bare abstraction is
a "fitful tracing of a portal," which in
Stevens' usual sense would mean an ar-
bitrary and intermittent symbol for an in-
tangible idea, a form which violates his
primary thesis that the imagination and its
poetry must be rooted in this world. As
such, beauty in the abstract is only a
Platonic assumption; being unsensuous, it is
another instance of what Stevens called in
"The Noble Rider and the Sound of
Words," quoting Coleridge, "Plato's dear,
gorgeous nonsense" (The Necessary Angel,
p. 3). But "in the flesh it is immortal," not
T. S. ELIOT'S THEORY OF DISSOCIATION
ALLEN AUSTIN
Although Eliot's term "the dissociation
of sensibility" has become "a critical catch-
Mr. Austin, who teaches at the East Chicago
Center of Indiana University, has published
other articles on Eliot in UKCR.
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TABLE 309
because the flesh endures, but because
beauty has been concretized, its only con-
ceivable mode of being. These four lines,
in sum, synthesize his poetic.
The following six lines are an extra-
ordinary metaphoric extension of the basic
statement, developing in terms of the para-
dox between mutability and stasis, between
nature's destructive flux and the constancy
of repetition which allows her to endure:
the paradox of the maiden's lost virginity
as both the death and apotheosis of maiden-
hood is eminently precise. Thus, the coda
reaffirms the opening lines. Susanna's allure
and the elders' moral excesses are operating
metaphors for what is essentially a drama-
tized aesthetic tension. The legal execution
of the elders and Susanna's mutable flesh
are likewise immortalized in the aesthetic
structure of the myth, whereas the recreant
emotions are subdued by "Death's ironic
scraping." Peter Quince's controlled tonali-
ties preserve Susanna in the enduring form
of art:
Now, in its [her beauty's] immortality
[in myth], it plays
On the clear viol of her memory [her
being remembered],
And makes a constant sacrament of
praise.
As Fred Stocking has pertinently com-
mented on this last figure: "A sacrament is
a physical act; but it is holy and it is
ritualistic: it is an act of art."4 The rituals
of myth and poetry preserve emotion; the
blind strictures of blind convention, the
Puritan distortions of the elders, leave it
spent and dissipated.
'"Stevens' 'Peter Quince at the Clavier,"'
Explicator, 5 (May 1947), item 47.
word,"' the definitions of it which have
appeared are either mistaken or at best only
partially valid. It is generally interpreted as
'William K. Wimsatt, Jr., Literary Criticism,
A Short History (New York, 1957), p. 253.
 310 COLLEGE ENGLISH
a split between images and ideas, which
presumably occurred in the seventeenth
century. The explanation is that poems be-
came either imagistic or abstract or that the
same poem presented images in one place
and ideas in another. This explanation, as far
as it goes, is valid; for Eliot's examples from
Tennyson and Browning are examples of
abstract poetry, and Eliot asserts that the
Romantic poets "thought and felt [created
images] by fits."2 The difficulty in Eliot's
definition is not, as F. W. Bateson main-
tains,3 in the term "felt," which has been
correctly interpreted by Basil Willey as
"image" (a combination of sensation and
emotion).4 The difficulty is in the term
"thought."
Eliot does not use "thought" in reference
to the unified sensibility in the ordinary
sense of "meaning," of concepts which may
be judged as true or false. Eliot's theory is
unrelated to Willey's thesis that the rise of
science and rationalism brought about the
belief that the images and myths of poetry
were no longer true and that therefore poet-
ry became either pleasant fictions (images)
or abstract statements which attempted to
conform to truth. The separation, in
Willey's view, is between images ("phan-
tasms") and "truth" (ideas believed to be
true). But Eliot is not concerned with this
loss of belief in the truth of poems. He is
concerned rather with the loss of intellect,
of "tough reasonableness," which is ir-
relevant to truth: "A philosophical theory
which has entered into poetry is established,
for its truth or falsity in one sense ceases
to matter, and its truth in another sense is
proved" (SE, p. 248). What Eliot regrets
is the loss of "ratiocination" or play of
intellect combined with sensation-emotion
(images), the substitution of reflection or
rumination for metaphysical wit. Whereas
Willey concentrates on the breakup of
religious unity caused by the loss of belief
in the intuitive truths of religious myths,
Eliot concentrates on the breakup of the
presumed integration of sensation, emotion,
and wit in metaphysical poetry.
'Selected Essays, new ed. (New York, 1950),
p. 248. Hereafter cited in the text as SE.
'EIC, I (July 1951), 302-312.
'The Seventeenth Century Background (Lon-
don, 1934), pp. 87-88, 206, 291-295.
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Although at the time that he formulated
the concept of dissociation (1921) Eliot
viewed poetry as necessarily non-discursive,
a statement of events or objects, he made
no truth claims for it, no assertions that it
presented a deeper and more important
truth than that of science. In fact, his
modest claims for poetry as a "superior
amusement" could hardly be objected to by
that ogre of dissociation, Thomas Hobbes
himself. It is true that Eliot accepted for a
time I. A. Richards' idea of poetry as
emotional truth, but he never presented this
idea as an apology for poetry, as a defense
against the incursions of science. After his
conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, Eliot
changed his position and claimed that
poetry possesses a discursive truth which is
necessarily dissociated from esthetic qual-
ity.
The term "thought" in Eliot's definition
refers to abstract ideas in relation to the
dissociated sensibility, but it refers to wit
or play of intellect in relation to the uni-
fied sensibility. That is, in Eliot's view, the
"felt thought" of the Metaphysicals in-
volves not only the integration of sensa-
tion and idea, the feeling of thought "as
immediately as the odour of a rose" (SE,
p. 247), but also a special kind of thought-
a detached intellectuality combined with
passion. Although Eliot maintains that an
amalgamation of disparate experience is a
characteristic of all poetry, he refers to a
special amalgamation, which presumably the
poets following the Metaphysicals lack-the
infusion of intellectual experience, such as
the reading of Spinoza, into emotional ex-
perience, such as falling in love. This con-
cept of amalgamation is much narrower
than Coleridge's theory of the unity of
opposites, and Eliot does not, in fact, apply
it to all poetry. Eliot's distinction is between
the intellectual or metaphysical poets (in-
'Eliot frequently makes this separation: in
"Poetry and Propaganda" he says that we must
judge both the "philosophy" and its "realiza-
tion"-Bookman, LXX (Feb. 1930), 598-599;
in his famous essay "Religion and Literature"
(1935) he separates religious and theological
values from "literary standards" (SE, p. 343);
and in Notes Towards the Definition of Cul-
ture (New York, 1949) he regrets the neces-
sary split between artistic and religious stand-
ards (p. 29).
 ROUND
cluding the Elizabethans and Jacobeans)
and the witty (Neo-classical), the emotional
(Romantic), and the reflective (Victorian)
poets.
Eliot is not attempting, as Frank Ker-
mode believes," to establish a rationale for
the non-discursive Image, but rather a
rationale for wit combined with emotion,
although Eliot later justifies the lack of
rational organization in poetry by referring
to its non-discursive quality, to the "logic
of imagination." Eliot's argument is that wit
dissociated from emotion causes the separa-
tion of ideas from images, the poet writing
exclusively either from the "cerebral cor-
tex" or from the heart. When he formulated
his theory, Eliot, unlike Willey, was not
concerned with defending religion and
poetry-the truth-yielding Image or intui-
tive way of knowing-against the encroach-
ments of science. Nor did he, like T. E.
Hulme, blame the presumed separation of
ideas from images on the loss of religious
belief. He was interested in establishing a
poetic of metaphysical wit, in defending
poetry which is both witty and emotional,
the kind of poetry that he himself was
writing. The concept of the integrated
image is incidental to and dependent on this
defense. In Eliot's theory, the sensationalism
of Remy de Gourmont is subordinated to a
metaphysical poetic.
The context of Eliot's definition clearly
reveals this emphasis on the dissociation of
wit and emotion. In the first place, Eliot
is reviewing Herbert Grierson's Introduc-
tion to Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of
the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1921),
and he follows closely Grierson's idea of
"passionate thinking," of the blend of "pas-
sion and thought, feeling and ratiocina-
tion": "Passionate thinking [Eliot's "felt
thought"] is always apt to become meta-
physical, probing and investigating the
experience from which it takes its rise" (p.
xvi). "With the peace of the Augustans the
mood changed, and poetry, ceasing to be
witty, became sentimental; but great poetry
is always metaphysical, born of men's pas-
sionate thinking about life and love and
death" (p. lviii).
In the second place, Eliot, citing Milton
'Romantic Image (New York, 1957), pp. 138-
161.
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TABLE 311
and Dryden as examples of dissociation,
argues (in the Marvell essay) that these two
poets exemplify the separate directions of
poetry-wit and magniloquence or levity
and loftiness, poetry becoming either witty
or emotional, not a unity of both (SE, p.
252). Modern poets, Eliot adds, may be
ironical or satirical but they "lack wit's
internal equilibrium," or they may be "ser-
ious" but are "afraid of acquiring wit, lest
they lose intensity" (SE, p. 263).
In addition to this dissociation of wit
from emotion and of ideas from images,
there is another dissociation, which inter-
pretations of Eliot's term have invariably
ignored, that of language from sensibility,
what Eliot calls the first effect of dissocia-
tion: "the language became more refined,
the feeling [which Eliot here uses synony-
mously with "sensibility"] become more
crude" (SE, p. 247). Racine and Baudelaire,
who exemplify the unity of language and
sensibility, are masters of diction and "the
most curious explorers of the soul," where-
as Milton and Dryden, also masters of dic-
tion, "triumph with a dazzling disregard of
the soul." Thus, the poet's finding of the
"verbal equivalent for states of mind and
feeling" involves not only the "transmuting
of ideas into sensations," but also a deep
interest in these states of mind, a sophisti-
cated sensibility integrated with language
(SE, pp. 248-249).
The dissociation of sensibility involves,
then, a split between wit and emotion, ideas
and images, and language and sensibility.
But the dissociation with which Eliot is
most concerned is that of wit, which is
irrelevant to "thought" in Willey's sense of
truth or in W. K. Wimsatt, Jr.'s sense of
"grounds" for emotion: "retreats into the
area of feeling and emotion, or into an
area of feeling and emotion conceived as
pure and prior to, or separate from, the
objects of knowledge which had previously
been considered their grounds" (Literary
Criticism, p. 284). Wimsatt's argument is
that the loss of trust in the "meanings con-
veyed by poems" drove poetry into a pure
emotionalism; thus, the rational grounds for
emotion were lost. Eliot, however, is not
defending the grounds of emotion; he is
lamenting the loss of intellectual poetry,
the amalgamation of intellectual and emo-
tional experience. The intellectual experi-
 312 COLLEGE ENGLISH

ence which Eliot cites, the reading of
Spinoza, is not the "grounds" of emotion,
but a part of the representation of "states
of mind and feeling," conveying "great
variety and complexity." Intellectual ex-
perience, in Eliot's view, is a part of man's
complete experience, including the "cerebral
cortex" as well as the heart, "the nervous
system, and the digestive tracts" (SE, p.
250).
Eliot's theory of the integration of wit
and emotion has caused confusion because
Eliot equates the combination of wit and
seriousness (the play of intellect and emo-
tion) with the reconciliation of opposite or
discordant qualities, with Coleridge's idea
of Imagination. The combination of intel-
lectual and emotional experience (the read-
ing of Spinoza and falling in love) becomes
in Eliot's theory simply the reconciliation
of opposites, a quality of all good poetry.
The metaphysical poets, in Eliot's view,
possess this quality to a greater degree than
do other poets. Such a stretching of wit and
emotion leaves ample space for thought and
emotion, which have been variously inter-
preted as truth and emotion, as cognitive
"grounds" and emotion, and, of course, as
idea and image.
Eliot's theory of dissociation has indeed
been seminal, constituting the basis of the
leading ideas on poetry which now prevail-
the non-discursive Image, the equating of
wit and emotion with thought and emotion,
the creation of the standard of "amalgama-
tion" or "inclusiveness" (involving "irony"
or paradox), and the equating of this
standard with poetic imagination. If we take
this interpretation seriously, then we must
say that in the seventeenth century a failure
in poetic imagination occurred, from which
we have never recovered. On the other
hand, if Eliot's concept of dissociation is
confined to the separation of wit and emo-
tion and not given an evaluative implication.
it has validity, for intellectual poetry in the
sense of play of intellect combined with
emotion did practically disappear in the
seventeenth century. But this concept
should not be related to the concept of the
separation of ideas and images, for there is
no evidence that such a separation occurred
-only that different kinds of images and
metaphors were used.
Also, dissociation, if defined as a separa-
tion between discursive thought and poetic
value, applies to a number of esthetic
theories since the seventeenth century-in-
cluding Eliot's own theory. Whereas
Thomas Hobbes solves the problem of
meaning by relegating poetry to pleasant
"fancy," Eliot solves it by first expelling
discursive thought from poetry, later by
relegating poetry to emotion, and still later
by setting up a dual standard by which to
judge separately thought and literary value.
Of all the dissociations-between religious
feeling and rational thought, ideas and
images, wit and emotion-the most im-
portant one in critical theory, as Frank
Kermode points out, is the dissociation of
discursive thought from poetic value, the
substitution of emotion or inner coherence
or separate thought value for integrated
meaning.

AN EPIGRAM

BARNEY CHILDS

There are few more distressing fates

Than growing old along with Yeats.

One of four epigrams published in College English, Nov. 1961, under wrong initials attributed
to the author, this verse is reprinted with the editor's apology to Barney Childs and a promise
to interpret proofreaders' marks more carefully.

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