T. S. Eliot, Poetry, and the Ethics of "Feeling"

Abstract:This essay offers an account of "feeling"—alongside a set of other, related experiential terms—in T. S. Eliot's ethics and aesthetics, suggesting a new way forward for philosophical poetics more broadly. Drawing on archival resources and neglected aspects of his academic background, it positions Eliot in a distinctive philosophical (and counter-philosophical) tradition which emphasized the "felt" experience of verse form. For Eliot, it argues, the moral and spiritual value of poetry was therefore dependent upon its capacity to make us "feel" in intensely personal, idiosyncratic, and slippery ways.