T.S. Eliot, poetry, and the ethics of "feeling"

This essay offers an account of “feeling”—alongside a set of other experiential terms—in T.S. Eliot’s ethics and aesthetics. Drawing on archival resources and neglected aspects of his academic background, it positions Eliot in a distinctive philosophical (and anti-philosophical) tradition which emphasised the “felt,” unfolding 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. The essay recommends this view as a possible way forward for Eliot studies and for philosophical poetics more broadly