I posted this question last spring on the MODBRITS list and didn't
get many responses; perhaps a list devoted to TSE will have more to
say:

     I teach "Tradition and the Individual Talent" almost
every year in a criticism course, and I have always been
mystified by Eliot's distinction between "emotions" and
"feelings."  I'm somewhat reassured by the fact that
Northrop Frye says that in Eliot the word "emotion" "is not
consistently distinguished from `feeling'," but that hasn't
stopped me from trying to understand Eliot's distinction.  I
would welcome any comments on what I have come up with: am I
on the right track, or is there something I have missed?

     In "Poetry and Drama," TSE contrasts "the nameable,
classifiable *emotions* and motives of our conscious life when
directed towards action" with "a fringe of indefinite
extent, of *feeling* which we can only detect, so to speak,
out of the corner of the eye and can never completely focus;
of *feeling* of which we are only aware in a kind of temporary
detachment from action" (*On Poetry and Poets* 86; emphasis
added).

     It seems that "emotion" thus refers to particular
passions, according to the classifications language
provides: hate, jealousy, anger, and so on.  "Feeling" seems
to refer more to the condition of being affected by such
emotions, but also by something far more indefinite and
unclassifiable, and it includes a physiological dimension.

     TSE also comments that "The ode of Keats contains a
number of feelings which have nothing to do with the
nightingale, but which the nightingale, perhaps because of
its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation,
served to bring together."  Is this a hint that Keats is
immature compared with the other poets mentioned?  On the
other hand, is TSE praising Keats for making an artistic
whole out of disparate material, fusing as it were Spinoza
and the noise of the typewriter?

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J. Russell Perkin
Department of English
Saint Mary's University
N.S., Canada
B3H 3C3

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