T.S. Eliot’s Literary Theories: Key Concepts
Unification and Dissociation of Sensibility
This expression is used with either a philosophical or a literary critical meaning. T.S. Eliot sees something very important happening in the 17th century: the emergence of modern science. He realizes that something distinguishes this new science from previous iterations. Eliot maintains that before the 17th century, there was a unification of sensibility.
Eliot argues that the differentiation between the self and the world is something brought about by the focus on objective study. The only way to study the world is to separate oneself from it, rendering the study non-subjective. Eliot believes that the best condition for poetic creation is the unification of sensibility. The best poetry is written when human beings have no consciousness of being different from the surrounding world.
Critical Perspective
From a critical point of view, the unification and dissociation of sensibility are presented somewhat differently. There is unification of sensibility when poets can think and feel simultaneously, possessing the capacity to use both the emotional and rational aspects of their being. They cannot distinguish between feeling and thinking.
When poets realized that thinking and feeling were distinct possibilities, they chose one over the other. In the 18th century, they chose thinking, aligning with rationalism. In the 19th century, they chose feeling, aligning with Romanticism. In the Victorian period, there was no unification of these two aspects. Eliot suggests a return to a true organic harmony, not an inorganic combination of feeling and rational thinking. The poet should not be aware of any gap, indicating a return to a period of great poetry.
Belief: The Relationship Between Ideology and Poetry
The poet must not be a philosopher or a thinker; the poet must be a poet. Their status as poets will grow inversely to their philosophical capacity. In the Elizabethan age, poets incorporated the ideas surrounding them into their poetry, without formulating a concrete philosophical creed.
The poet might write in favor of the Tudor dynasty, conveying the message that political instability is undesirable. This is not philosophy, but rather a practical stance. The poet creates the ideas themselves and uses poetry as a vehicle for these ideas. You can write poetry if the ideas expressed in that poem are your genuine beliefs.
Objective Correlative
The objective correlative is presented as the sole method for expressing emotion in poetry. There should be a way to present emotions in a poem without succumbing to emotional obscenity and sentimentalism. Eliot defines the objective correlative as something objective that correlates to an emotion.
Emotion cannot be directly expressed in poetry; instead, something is placed that will evoke the emotion. “Objective” refers to something related to an object. Therefore, an objective correlative is a material object that evokes a certain emotion in the character of a literary work. It is objective because the object, not the emotion, is found in the poem.
Emotions do not appear directly in the poem to avoid sentimentalism. Instead, emotions appear in the reader’s mind, invoked by an object. For Eliot, the objective correlative evokes a certain emotion in its author. The author has an emotion, works it into the poem as a material object, and, ideally, the same emotion will be invoked in the reader.
Literature is a presentation of feeling through a statement of events in human actions. Direct presentation of feelings is avoided as it leads to sentimentalism. Stronger writers translate their feelings into objects that effectively express their thoughts.