Objective Correlative
The next two lines [of Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish] are similarly structured: “For love / The leaning grasses and two light above the sea.” That is, “For love,” an abstraction, impossible to grasp, the poet should present something concrete: “The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea.” Although I can’t say precisely how the grasses and lights here stand for love, somehow as images they do seem romantic, mysterious, moving to me. This principle of selecting something concrete to stand for an abstraction had already been advocated by T.S. Eliot in 1919 in what turned out to be an extremely influential opinion for the formation of New Criticism: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art,” Eliot said, “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” (“Hamlet and his Problems”). Not surprisingly, thoughout its history New Criticism has been especially concerned with analyizing the imagery of particular works, noticing how a poem’s “objective correlatives” structure its ideas.
Steven Lynn. Text and Contexts: Writing about Literature with Critical Theory (2nd ed, 1998), p.25.
Tags: criticism, imagery, poetry
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