T S Eliot Theory of Objective Correlative Thomas

T. S. Eliot: Theory of Objective Correlative Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888 – 1965) was an essayist, playwright, critic and "one of the twentieth century's major poets”. He was born in the United States, but he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25) and was naturalized as a British citizen in 1927 at age 39.

Eliot and the Romantic Tradition The Romantics believed that poetry is an expression of the self. The best poets are those who express themselves as directly and personally as possible. Eliot puts himself in opposition to this theory and called for an impersonal method of writing poetry. For him poetry is not an expression of the self but an escape from it. Eliot sees that the only way to express emotions in literature is through the use of objective correlative.

What is the Objective ? The objective correlative is : “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. ”

Theory of the objective correlative T. S. Eliot developed his theory of objective correlative in his essay “Hamlet and His Problems” in his book The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. In this book he discusses his view of Shakespeare’s incomplete development of Hamlet’s emotions. In this essay, Eliot states: “The artistic ‘inevitability’ lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion…. ”. According to Eliot, the feelings of Hamlet are not sufficiently supported by the story and the other characters surrounding him. The objective correlative’s purpose is to express the character’s emotions by showing rather than describing feelings as pictured earlier by Plato.