12 - The poetry of sensibility

Summary

To designate a body of literature “the poetry of sensibility” aligns it not only with a kind of feeling but with a cultural movement. An intricate culture of sensibility flourished in late eighteenth-century Britain. It affected the behavior of men and women, the conception and development of social reform, and the nature of prose and poetry. It expressed a set of assumptions and values that operated in philosophy as well as fiction and influenced even politics. It had profound consequences long after it had largely disappeared as a social movement.

Sensibility, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, is “emotional consciousness; glad or sorrowful, grateful or resentful recognition of a person’s conduct, or of a fact or a condition of things.” Again, it is defined as “Quickness and acuteness of apprehension or feeling; the quality of being easily and strongly affected by emotional influences.” And yet again: “Capacity for refined emotion; delicate sensitiveness of taste; also, readiness to feel compassion for suffering, and to be moved by the pathetic in literature or art.” Sensibility always involves emotion, and it always entails willingness and ability to respond to others. From a twentieth-century point of view, its responses may seem excessive. Marianne Dashwood, in Sense and Sensibility, rhapsodizing over dead leaves, offers a comic version of its possible extremity. But Marianne requires chastening. Her sensible sister makes fun of her extravagances, and her creator arranges the plot to reeducate her. Her predecessors in fine feeling, in contrast, won admiration from many of their contemporaries.