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Helping define the objective correlative, Eliot's essay "Hamlet and His Problems", [1] republished in his book The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism discusses his view of Shakespeare's incomplete development of Hamlet's emotions in the play Hamlet. Eliot uses Lady Macbeth's state of mind as an example of the successful objective ...
The objective correlative concept that Eliot popularized in this essay refers to the concept that the only way to express an emotion through art is to find "a set of objects, a situation, [or] a chain of events" [2] that will, when read or performed, evoke a specific sensory experience in the audience.
Topics include Eliot's opinions of many literary works and authors, including William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, and the poets Dante Alighieri and William Blake. [ 1 ] One of his most important prose works, " Tradition and the Individual Talent ", which was originally published in two parts in The Egoist , is a part of The Sacred Wood .
In "Hamlet and His Problems" Eliot presents the phrase "objective correlative." The theory is that the expression of emotion in art can be achieved by a specific, and almost formulaic, prescription of a set of objects, including events and situations. A particular emotion is created by presenting its correlated objective sign.
Also very influential were the critical essays of T. S. Eliot, such as "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Hamlet and His Problems", in which Eliot developed his notions of the "theory of impersonality" and "objective correlative" respectively. Eliot's evaluative judgments, such as his condemnation of John Milton and John Dryden, his ...
Also important to New Criticism was the idea—as articulated in Eliot's essay "Hamlet and His Problems"—of an "objective correlative", which posits a connection among the words of the text and events, states of mind, and experiences. [94]
Eliot targeted Hamlet's disgust with his mother as lacking an "objective correlative"; viz., his feelings were excessive in the context of the play. Questions about Gertrude and other minor characters were later taken underwing by the feminist criticism movement, as criticism focused more and more on questions of gender and political import.
Thing theory is particularly well suited to the study of modernism, due to the materialist preoccupations of modernist poets such as William Carlos Williams, who declared that there should be "No ideas but in things" or T. S. Eliot's idea of the objective correlative. [6]