LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 20:10 October 2020
ISSN 1930-2940

Editors:
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

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T. S. Eliot’s Theory of Objective Correlative

Dr. Poonam Sinha, Ph.D. (English)

An objective correlative is a literary term referring to a symbolic article used to provide explicit, rather than implicit, access to such traditionally inexplicable concepts as emotion or colour. Popularised by T.S. Eliot in his essay, Hamlet and His Problems 1 (1919), its subsequent vogue in literary criticism, Eliot has confessed, astonished its inventor.

The term "objective correlative" was first used by Washington Allston, a poet and painter who was singularly influential in the Romantic movement of American landscape painting, around 1840 in the “Introductory Discourse” of his Lectures on Art2 :

“Will any one assert that the surrounding inorganic elements of air, earth, heat, and water produce its peculiar form? Though some, or all, of these may be essential to its development, they are so only as its predetermined correlatives, without which its existence could not be manifested; and in like manner must the peculiar form of the vegetable preexist in its life, – in its idea, – in order to evolve these assimilants its own proper organism.

“No possible modification in the degrees or proportion of these elements can change the specific form of a plant, – for instance, a cabbage into a cauliflower; it must ever remain a cabbage, smaller or large, good or bad. So, too, is the external world to the mind; which needs, also, as the condition of its manifestations, its objective correlative. Hence, the presence of some outward object, predetermined to correspond to the preexisting idea in its living power, is essential to the evolution of its proper end, – the pleasurable emotion.”

Eliot used this term to explain how emotion is best expressed in poetry. It cannot be simply transmitted from the mind of the poet to the mind of the reader. It has to turn itself into something concrete – a picture of a person, place, or thing suggestive of it – to evoke the same emotion in the reader. The object in which emotion is thus bodied forth is its external equivalent or objective correlative.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Dr Poonam Sinha

Dr. Poonam Sinha
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