Objective correlative

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Objective correlative is a literary term popularized by T. S. Eliot in his essay 'Hamlet and His Problems'^[1] in 1919.

The term was first used by Washington Allston around 1840 in the 'Introductory Discourse' of his Lectures on Art:

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 developement, 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 by 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, small or large, good or bad. So, too, is the external world to the mind; which needs, also, as the condition of its manifestation, 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 thought that the only way to express things in art is to find an object, a set of objects, a situation –- something concrete that evokes the emotion the artist wants to express.

A good example of this is in Eliots "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" Lines 73-74 "I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."

In Eliot's own words:

"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."