The doctrine of the objective correlative is a kind of summation of what Eliot, along with Hulme and Pound, derived from the theory and practice of the French symbolists. The symbolists had argued that poetry cannot express emotion directly; emotions can only be evoked.
And their studies had canvassed the various means by which this can be done. Baudelaire maintained that every color, sound, odor, conceptualized emotion, and every visual image has its correspondence in each of the other fields. Mallarme, insisting that poetry was made, not of ideas, but of words”, devoted himself to exploring the potentialities of words conceived as gesture or as modes of emotive suggestion, and treated the interplay of words as a kind of ballet or a kind of “musical” organization.
Objective correlative is a term rather casually introduced by T.S. Eliot in an essay on “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919) whose subsequent vogue in literary criticism, Eliot has confessed, astonished its inventor.