objective correlative

objective correlative, literary theory first set forth by T.S. Eliot in the essay “Hamlet and His Problems” and published in The Sacred Wood (1920).

According to the theory,

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 term was originally used in the 19th century by the painter Washington Allston in his lectures on art to suggest the relation between the mind and the external world. This notion was enlarged upon by George Santayana in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900). Santayana suggested that correlative objects could not only express a poet’s feeling but also evoke it. Critics have argued that Eliot’s idea was influenced, as was much of Eliot’s work, by the poetics of Ezra Pound and that the theory dates at least to the criticism of Edgar Allan Poe.