Where does TS Eliot say this? (quote from Martin Amis' 'The Information')?

Question

"Before he spoke, there in the button plush, Richard hurriedly wondered whether this had been a natural resource of men and women - passionate speech - before 1700 or whenever Eliot said it was, before thought and feeling got dissociated."

This is from Martin Amis' 'The Information' and I don't know where he got this reference to Eliot from.
I would very much like to know how Eliot made such a statement - that people lost the ability to speak passionately around 1700 - and in what context, with what justification etc.
Are there any TS Eliot authorities out there who can verify if he did say anything like this and if so where?

Answer 1

+ ya know I looked and looked and I can't find the exact place either. It must be from something pretty early.

Answer 2

I doubt anyone has ever understood Eliot's line about 'the loud lament of the disconsolate chimera' - but most readers will acknowledge that the line is some kind of a communication. Eliot could have been quite a successful semiotician, had he not chosen to be a poet and a banker instead. He would have been acutely aware of the problems with even saying what 'understanding' is. Lewis Carroll had visited the same basic territory: the hero of The Hunting of the Snark has no name: He would answer to "Hi!" or to any loud cry, Such as "Fry me!" or "Fritter my wig!" To "What-you-may-call-um!" or "What-was-his-name!" But especially "Thing-um-a-jig!" 'Fritter my wig' is clearly a communication - but can anyone claim to 'understand' it? I think Eliot may be having a joke with us here. The statement itself has communicative value, but no real meaning.

Answer 3

This idea is roughly adapted from T. S. Eliot's critical essays, especially "The Metaphysical Poets" and "Andrew Marvell," eventually published in Selected Essays, 1917-32 (1932).

As one person has well said, "In these essays he effects a new historical perspective on the hierarchy of English poetry, putting at the top Donne and other Metaphysical poets of the 17th century and lowering poets of the 18th and 19th centuries. Eliot's second famous phrase appears here--'dissociation of sensibility,' invented to explain the change that came over English poetry after Donne and Andrew Marvell. This change seems to him to consist in a loss of the union of thought and feeling."

Actually, this is an idea that recurs in Eliot's critical work and is related to the themes and styles of much of his poetry, particularly The Wasteland and The Four Quartets. His basic critical ideas--and his first famous phrase, "objective correlative"--were developed in some detail in essays such as "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Hamlet and His Problems" in The Sacred Wood (1920).