Although concerned with a slightly later Continental context, György Lukács offers us a useful way to contextualize this artistic fall, drawing out the connections between what he similarly labels a “deterioration” of the aesthetic and the rise of reified culture. Lukács observes that humanity’s desire for unity, harmony, connection to the world and to others becomes ever more acute as their existence is increasingly shaped by atomization, alienation, and (self-) division. For Eliot, the English Restoration saw the emergence of a new aesthetic economy that divorced idea from sensation, observation from experience, and thought from feeling. Eliot provocatively comments on what he terms a seventeenth-century “dissociation of sensibility,” an aesthetic sea change “from which we have never recovered” (288). In his oft-cited defense of metaphysical poetry T.S.
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