OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE

As defined by T. S. Eliot in ‘Hamlet’ (1919):

Its role is principally related to producing art IMPERSONALLY, as a technique for turning emotional excess into precise feelings grounded on external fact. It is a great example of Eliot's early genius for the critical soundbite, but does not translate into precise critical use. Its importance lies elsewhere. Behind the cold scientific posturing of this formula crouch crucial psychotherapeutic overtones. Eliot may have seen in Hamlet's problems the diagnosis of his own impending breakdown that would soon send him to Dr Vittoz for therapy in Switzerland while writing The Waste Land (1922). It is modernist art as record of mental disorder in search of cognitive structure grounded in sensory experience. It soon, however, crystallises as the basis for a deliberate ideological position. Eliot's insistence ‘that men cannot get on without giving allegiance to something outside themselves’ in ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923), what he calls ‘Outside Authority’, is the political version of the objective correlative.

READING

Eliot, T. S. (1999) ‘Hamlet’ (1919), in Selected Essays. London: Faber & Faber.

Eliot, T. S. (1999), ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923), in Selected Essays. London: Faber & Faber.

OBJECTIVISM

Although the Objectivist poets emerged as a group in the early 1930s, William Carlos Williams's line ‘No ideas but in things’ from the 1927 version of his long poem Paterson was already seen among his contemporaries as a summary of the main poetic EXPERIMENTS in the twentieth century.

The Objectivists’ main literary and political views were affected by massive unemployment and social unrest in the USA and by the rise of fascism in Europe. They were also influenced by the representatives of IMAGISM such as Ezra Pound. The four leading Objectivists – Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi and Charles Reznikoff – saw a poem as an artefact that presents the modality of things seen as an immediate structure of relations.