Notes of March, 30th 2012

The objective correlative

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 Waste Land

The Waste Land is a dramatic monologue, written by T.S.Eliot. More precisely, the monologue is a kind of poetry born during the Victorian Age. It consists in adopting a dramatis personae  talks and expresses himself or herself  and who is not the poet who writes.
It is a narrative choice used a lot by Modernist poetry, because it allows to express someone's feelings, thoughts, sensations etc, to express what is inside someone's mind. This is the reason why the language used to make up a dramatic monologue is the colloquial and ordinary language.

Right from the title, the intelligent reader makes himself expecting to read something negative or pessimistic. " Waste" means dissipate, throw away, devastate, unfertile, and it is an adjective that could be associated to the nature, to a land , but also to the human nature.