ABSTRACT
A piece of Eliot’s early reflective prose may hold, in as masterly a relation as an Eliot poem, the combined substance of its elements. The paragraph dealing with the 'spectator' emotions expressed by Aeschylus in the death of Agamemnon, with the 'protagonist' emotions of Othello, and with the 'floating feelings' introduced into Keats's ode by the 'attractive name' and 'reputation' of the nightingale illuminates more than Eliot's aesthetic. It tells the reader of 'Sweeney among the Nightingales' how to sort out the kinds of affect simulated in that poem, and recapitulates the swift transitions, novel juxtapositions and literary thefts of the poetry. The poet's mind, a 'medium' for poetry, has to be thus conditioned, moreover, to 'surrender' itself to the life of art which is 'more valuable' than its life. The essential kinship of the transformational theory to the techniques of the essays appears more vividly in critical contexts than in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’.
