With the passing years, the criticism of T. S. Eliot has lost much of the power it once had to influence the literary taste of the age. Yet one casual comment by Eliot echoes again and again through the scholarship and criticism of recent times. “In the seventeenth century,” Eliot wrote in his essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” “a dissociation of the sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.” Eliot was eventually to confess doubt about the cause of this dissociation, but he did note that, following Donne and Marvell, poetic feeling became cruder, until, in the eighteenth century, “The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected” (p. 248).