Dissociation of sensibility Dissociation of sensibility Dissociation of sensibility is a literary term first used by T. S. Eliot in his essay “The Metaphysical Poets”. It refers to the way in which intellectual thought was separated from the experience of feeling in seventeenth century poetry. Eliot used the term to describe the manner by which the nature and substance of English poetry changed “between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning.” In this essay, Eliot attempts to define the metaphysical poet and in doing so to determine the metaphysical poet’s era as well as
S. T. Joshi S. T. Joshi Sunand Tryambak Joshi (born 22 June 1958), known as S. T. Joshi, is an American literary critic, novelist, and a leading figure in the study of H. P. Lovecraft and other authors of weird and fantastic fiction. Besides having written what critics such as Harold Bloom and Joyce Carol Oates consider to be the definitive biography of Lovecraft, "I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft" (Hippocampus Press, 2 vols., 2010 [originally published in one volume as "", 1996]), Joshi has prepared (with David E. Schultz) several annotated editions of works by Ambrose Bierce.