The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms - Ross Murfin 2018

Objective correlative

Objective correlative: A term adapted by poet and critic T. S. Eliot in his 1919 essay “Hamlet and His Problems” to refer to actions, objects, or situations that correspond with and thus implicitly evoke a particular emotion from the audience or reader. As Eliot wrote, “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ’objective correlative’; in other words, 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.” Asserting that “artistic ’inevitability’ lies in [the] complete adequacy of the external to the emotion,” Eliot argued that “the facts as they appear” in William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (1602) do not justify Hamlet’s depth of feeling and thus fail to provide convincing motivation, rendering the play “an artistic failure.” While the term objective correlative was first used by the American poet and painter Washington Allston in his Lectures on Art, published posthumously in 1850, it was not until Eliot redefined it that it elicited widespread interest and debate in critical circles, especially among the New Critics.