岑雄 岡田’s scientific contributions

T. S. Eliot referred to the seventeenth century as the century in which "a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered..." and he considered Donne as the poet to whom "a thought was an experience," in whom "we find direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling." Possibly, it is as an effect of this "dissociation" that we find the present tendency to, and our predilection for, sentimentality or crude emotional expression in poetry, and this predilection gives us a somewhat easier approach to some kinds of Romantic and Victorian poetry (e.g. Shelley's poems exclaiming his self-indulgent effusion or despair) than to poetry of other periods and style. (More sober poems of the nineteenth century are marked by contemplation or reflectiveness in which is to be found a kind of "self-pity," as David Daiches points out in some poems of Keats and Arnold.) On the other hand, it is natural that such predilection also creates for us a kind of barrier to Elizabethan lyrics in which conventions were not considered as hostile to self-expression, in which the conventions of verse were merely reflections of the formalities of the life itself. In this context it should be remembered that Huizinga regarded the formalties of the period around the fifteenth century as the product of "the passionate and violent soul of the age," of the longing for the beauty of life. Formalization gave the poets proper medium in which to express the poet's feelings embodied in an "objective" form, a garment in which to clothe his naked self. Conventions in poetry, for example in sonnet, promoted the subtlety, complexity or sophistication of the feelings expressed in the poems. Poetic conventions should be considered thus in greater context, not merely as a barrier to personal expression, but as the product of the mentality of the period, as the mode in which the intense interests of the Renaissance expressed themselves, as a kind of limited 'tradition' to which the poet's individual talent was amalgamated. In these considerations, Eliot's concepts in criticism, such as "dissociation of sensibility," "poetry not as a turning loose of emotion but as an escape from emotion," throw some light on our understanding or appreciation of the poetry of Renaissance, in which the relation of feeling and form was much more complex than in some kinds of poetry in the 19th century, and which reveals much more beauty and subtlety when examined closely and attentively.

In his famous essay on Hamlet, T. S. Eliot referred to Shakespeare's Sonnets as 'full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art.' In his ranking of the Sonnets with Hamlet ('Hamlet, like the Sonnets'), he seems to have a critical view on the artistic perfection of the Sonnets, though, probably, not so critical as to label them as 'artistic failure.' What does this rather obscure comment on the Sonnets imply? His comment involves his attitude about the problem of personal expression in poetry, and is related to his early poetic, and his later dramatic, method. The implications of his comment on the Sonnets can be seen on several levels. First, the level of the poetic style in which Shakespeare was gradually reaching for the complex expression of his mature plays but had not yet completely mastered it. Second, the circumstances in which the Sonnets were written, circulated among 'his private friends' and published. That that they are not necessarily in 'the right order' and do not make a 'sequence', that they are different in style and quality, suggests an attachment of the author with the material, a lack of artistic ordering and perfection in which the poet's personal emotion and poetry should be separated. Third, the peculiar quality of the Elizabethan sonnet sequence as an artistic medium, in which 'the man who suffers' and 'the mind which creates' are not completely separated, in which the convention is not perfected as in Dante's Vita Nuova. This point relates to the themes treated in the Sonnets, and also in the Problem Plays, in which the themes are displayed as problems unsolved rather than given artistic resolution. Eliot was deeply concerned with these themes, but he sought for their expression in his own self-conscious way, beginning with the use of personae in his early poetry, and later expressing them through the characters of his dramatic works. His comment on the Sonnets may be considered as a by-product of his quest for the proper medium to express these themes.