objective correlative
objective correlative,a term used by T. S. Eliot in his essay ‘Hamlet and His Problems’ ( 1919 ; included in The Sacred Wood, 1920 ). Eliot ascribes the alleged ‘artistic failure’ of the play Hamlet to the fact that Hamlet himself is ‘dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear…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.’ This phrase, like ‘dissociation of sensibility ’, became very fashionable, and was doubtless one of those to which Eliot referred in a lecture in 1956 (‘The Frontiers of Criticism’) when he spoke of ‘a few notorious phrases which have had a truly embarrassing success in the world’.
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