Eliot’s thoughts about an impersonal art arrived at their most celebrated formulation in an essay entitled “Hamlet and his Problems” (1919). 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.”
The phrase “objective correlative” has gained a currency probably far beyond anything that the author could have expected or intended. With the advantage of hindsight, it is easy to see why; the notion of an objective correlative puts the emphasis firmly upon the work itself as a structure.
Since the poet cannot transfer his emotions or his idea from his own mind directly to his readers, there must be some kind of mediation – “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events.” It is through these that the transaction between author and reader necessarily takes take place. This is where “what the author has to say” is objectified, and it is with the shape and character of this object that the critic is properly concerned.
The doctrine of the “objective correlative” places a thoroughly anti-Romantic stress upon craftsmanship; but Eliot, in the way in which he argues it, manages to involve himself in the language of expressionism.
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The doctrine of the objective correlative is a kind of summation of what Eliot, along with Hume and Pound, derived from the theory and practice of the French symbolists.
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.