Dissociation of sensibility was a phrase introduced into literary criticism by T.S. Eliot in his essay “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921). Eliot’s claim was that the metaphysical poets of the earlier seventeenth century, like the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, “possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience.”
They exhibited “a direct sensuous apprehension of thought”, and felt “their thought as immediately as the odor of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.” But “in the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.” This dissociation was greatly aggravated by the influence of Milton and Dryden; and later poets in English either thought or felt, but did not think and feel as an act of unified sensibility.