Focus: Thomas Sterns Eliot

by : Don Taylor

Thomas Sterns Eliot realized by his experiments with the language, his sometimes abandonment of English syntax and punctuation, technical innovation, and by his subject matter – which, more often than not, centers in loneliness, disillusionment, faithlessness, betrayal, and the withering away of love.

That he would not have is realized in his theory of the "objective correlative" – " a set of objects, a chain of events" which become the formula for a particular emotion. Most poets favor the explicit naming of the emotion in the poem. Readers quickly know what emotion is being expressed – it is called my name or by attendant symptoms.

Eliot says the only way to express emotion in a poem is by finding the formula – the formula consists of objects, names, geography, allusions, references, sensory experience, action, behavior, conversation, and the mixing of past, present and future.

American Eliot spent most of his life in England where he declared himself a Catholic in religion, a Royalist in politics, and a Classicist in Literature. In his view writing in a tradition was all important for a mature, serious poet– but he did not intend a slavish, blind or timid adherence to the ways of the proceeding generations. It means that a poet must have a sense of history and a perception of how the past plays a significant role in contemporary work. A poet's work must take its place in the tradition of poetry. It doesn't stand alone, but it must be new work if it is to be in the tradition. To be in the tradition is not to be 'traditional.'

I would like now to compare a typical poem by posted by a poet at "Spyder's Poetry Empire," to lines from Eliot's work – as a way to define what Eliot meant by his 'objective correlative.' Let us start with the concept of a lover's faithlessness and inattention.

I can really feel you hate me
and my frustration hurts,
you don't know how it feels
to see you the way you are.
My soul reaches out for
you and your love.

Eliot ....
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted
.........
The light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
.........
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
––Eliot, Preludes, III

Eliot presents to us a series of behaviors, nouns, objects, sensory experience as a formula that equals the emotion. The emotion is not revealed; but it reads far more emotional that direct statement by the poet.

What should I do?
Should I ask her to marry me,
I love her so much that I should.
I hope she cries and smiles
and nods her head and says she could.

Eliot ....
..... and indeed there will be time
To wonder, 'Do I dare?' and 'Do I dare?'
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair
.......
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
........
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat, and
snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
–––Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Eliot removes his personality from his poetry and from the romantic concept that poetry is an expression of the poet's feeling. At his zenith, Eliot is a philosophical poet concerned with abstract universals. In Eliot's view a poet lamenting his own personal woes seems fawning and self-diminishing, and presenting material entirely not for public display.

But this was Eliot. Many other poets of the first rank would have challenged Eliot's concept of the objective correlative and would have insisted that personal, emotional poetry is fulfilling to write and fulfilling to read and that it can be mature, beautiful, artistic.

This is what makes poetry so fascinating. It can be silly, fun, serious, wrenching, confessing, objective, full of motion or motion- less, concrete or abstract – and can be a mixing of the elements of above in a single poem.