Eliot’s mythical method
Eliot sees myth and ritual (the use of anthropological material) as a potential means of
ordering and transforming into significance contemporary experience. Their technical
function seems to have been even more important to him than their symbolic meaning. By
November 1923, after The Waste Land’s publication, Eliot is ever more explicit about this
problem. The very title of his review in “The Dial” of Joyce’s Ulysses make the point - Ulysses,
Order and Myth.
He sets out to answer the challenge of readers who, in terms used by many
early readers of The Waste Land, saw Ulysses as “an invitation to chaos; an expression of
feelings which are perverse, partial and a distortion of reality”. Eliot, in answer to this, calls
the work classical and complains that that people have underestimated the
importance of the Odyssey parallel as a structural device
“In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and
antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him”. Then comes
the famous remark which sounds so like a comment on his own The Waste Land: “It is simply
a way of controlling and ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense
panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”.
Eliot’s own technique for presenting, the “immense panorama” is different from Joyce’s. By
compression and allusion he condenses it where Joyce expands the moment almost to
infinitude, but both resort to a black-cloth of mythology to hold their material in

share.

 

Eliot's objective correlative

It is used also by Eugenio Montale, italian poet.

A now famous term used by T. S. Eliot in an essay “On Hamlet” (1919). The relevant passage

is: “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”.

The objective correlative means: "objective"-something concrete about object; "correlative"- thing that put in relation something.

In the essay T.S. Eliot explains how to come to judgement of a piece of work. He says that the work has to be put in relation with the greatest works of tradition.

The question asked by T.S. Eliot is how is the easiest way to express the emotions.So he takes the works that deal with emotions, in particularly Macbeth and Hamlet, two tragedies full of emotions. Macbeth's conscience is full of emotions and he says that no one can tell him something that will touch him. Shakespeare used different modalities for express the state of mind and emotions: stomach full of snakes, animal, scorpion... Another important example is the lady's sleepwalking when her conscience is full of emotions and it cannot contains them. In conclusion T.S. Eliot affirms that Shakespeare found the objective correlative.

Shakespeare managed to find the right way of expressing in Macbeth, while in Hamlet it did not work because in former the words used are completely adequate to the state of mind of characters while in latter the protagonist is dominated by inexpressible emotion, madness and he used too many words for explain it,so the audience was confused. He did not find the right formula, because there has to be an exquisite balance between form and matter(the quest and the order are typical themes of modernist culture). There has to be a balance between the matter (thoughts,feelings,actions) and the form (words), otherwise there is detachment and incommunicableness between the characters and the audience. There has to be a link between the parts, something that tie together all the parts, so the objective correlative is the link between the language of emotions and emotions.

The poetry that express the emotions is a lyric and the culture that deals with emotions is Romanticism so there are many metaphors. The modernist poets wants poetry to be unique for all, concept of impersonal art.