From ‘Burnt Norton’ to ‘East Coker’: The Passing of the Unified Sensibility

Abstract

‘Burnt Norton’ holds a climactic position in the development of T. S. Eliot as a poet. It was his last, and indeed his first, poem to extract a full measure of feeling not simply from thought but from speculative thought, and it is supreme in the intensity of the feelings it expresses. ‘East Coker’ by contrast is dominated by a concept of cyclical change that only sporadically connects with felt experience in the verse. Eliot’s idea of the unified sensibility could find no two texts better suited to an exploration of its practical force or of the conditions permitting its fulfillment. In 1921, with a succession of essays and reviews culminating in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ that September, Eliot advanced his now familiar description of certain poets as exercising a unified sensibility. They so ‘incorporated their erudition into their sensibility’ that ‘their mode of feeling was directly and freshly altered by their reading and thought’. From this observation he instantly produced the insight that Chapman and Donne exhibited ‘a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a re-creation of thought into feeling’. With the reasons for his belief that most English poetry since the seventeenth century had wanted this quality, or with present critical objections to his historical perspective upon it, I am not here concerned.