T.S. Eliot was one of the greatest literary critics of the 20th century in England. He devised several influential critical concepts, including the "objective correlative." The objective correlative refers to a set of objects, events, or situations that allow a poet to evoke a particular emotion in the reader, rather than stating the emotion directly. Eliot believed poets should "show" their emotions through an objective correlative, not just say them. His criticism argued that a work of art must be understood in the context of previous works. As a critic, Eliot had influence but was also faulted for personal biases and inconsistent standards.

1. T.S Eliot as A Critic & his
Objective Correlative
Presented to: Sir Salman
Presented by: Ayesha Afzal

2. Who is a Critic???
• A person who judges the merits of literary works, especially one who
does so professionally.
• Critics are publicly accepted and, to a significant degree, followed
because of the quality of their assessments or their reputation.
• Critics are the people who evaluate a piece of writing on base of
merits and do so to bring positive changes. They try to highlight
different aspects of a writer’s piece of writing.

3. T.S Eliot
• Eliot is one of the greatest literary critics of England from the point of
view of his critical writings. His five hundred essays occasionally
published as reviews and articles had a far-reaching influence on
literary criticism in the country.
• His criticism was revolutionary which inverted the critical tradition of
the whole English speaking work.

4. • Eliot devised numerous critical concepts that gained wide popularity
and has a broad influence on criticism. ‘Objective co-relative’,
‘Dissociation of sensibility’, ‘Unification of sensibility’ are few of
Eliot works hotly debated by critics.
• His comments on the nature of Poetic Drama and the relation between
poetry and drama have done much to bring about a revival of Poetic
Drama in the modern age. Even if he had written no poetry, he would
have made his mark as a distinguished and subtle (shrewd) critic.

5. • Eliot’s views on the nature of poetic process are equally revolutionary.
According to him, poetry is not inspiration, it is organization. The
poet’s mind is like a vessel in which are stored numerous feelings,
emotions and experiences. The poetic process fuses these distinct
experiences and emotions into new wholes.
• In his most famous critical essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent",
Eliot argues that art must be understood not in a vacuum, but in the
context of previous pieces of art. Eliot himself employed this concept
on many of his works, especially on his long-poem The Waste Land.

6. • As a critic Eliot has his faults. Often his criticism is spoiled by
personal and religious prejudices, blocking an honest and impartial
estimate. Moreover, he does not judge all by the same standards. With
the passing of time his critical faculties were increasingly exercised on
social problems. Critics have also found fault with his style as too full
of doubts, reservations and qualifications.

7. Objective Correlative
• The theory of the ‘objective correlative’ is one of the most important
critical concepts of T.S. Eliot. It exerted a tremendous influence on the
critical temper of twentieth century. In the concept of the ‘objective
correlative’, Eliot’s doctrine of poetic impersonality finds its most
classic formulation.

8. • Eliot himself defines ‘objective correlative’ as “a set of objects, a
situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula” for the poet’s
emotion so that “when the external facts are given the emotion is at
once evoked.”

9. • According to Eliot, the poet cannot communicate his emotions directly
to the readers, he has to find some object, suggestive of it and only
then he can evoke the same emotion in his readers.
• So this ‘objective correlative’ is “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.”

10. • Like Aristotle, Eliot is of the opinion that it is not the business of the
poet to ‘say’ but to ‘show’, not to present but to represent. In other
words, Eliot’s concept of the objective correlative is based on the
notion that it is not the business of the poet to present his emotions
directly but rather to represent them indirectly through the ‘objective
correlative’ which become the formula for the poet’s original
emotions.

11. • One of the reasons why Eliot admires Dante’s poetry is that Dante’s
was ‘a visual imagination,’ because he attempted ‘to make us see what
he saw,’ because he did not lose his grasp over ‘the objective
correlative.’

12. • If writers or poets or playwrights want to create an emotional reaction
in the audience, they must find a combination of images, objects, or
description evoking the appropriate emotion. The source of the
emotional reaction isn't in one particular object, one particular image,
or one particular word. Instead, the emotion originates in the
combination of these phenomena when they appear together.

13. Thank You