This term, which had been coined by the American painter and poet Washington Allston (1779-1843), was introduced by T. S. Eliot, rather casually, into his essay "Hamlet and His Problems" (1919)
Its subsequent vogue in literary criticism, Eliot said, astonished him. "The only way of expressing emotion," Eliot wrote, "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," and which will evoke the same emotion from the reader.
Eliot's formulation has been often criticized for falsifying the way a poet actually composes, since no object or situation is in itself a "formula" for an emotion, but depends for its emotional significance and effect on the way it is rendered and used by a particular poet.
The vogue of Eliot's concept of an outer correlative for inner feelings was due in part to its accord with the reaction of the New Criticism against vagueness of description and the direct statement of feelings in poetry—an oft-cited example
was Shelley's "Indian Serenade": "I die, I faint, I fail"—and in favor of defi-
niteness, impersonality, and descriptive concreteness.
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