Objective correlative

The objective correlative is "a group of things or events which systematically represent emotions." Washington Allston coined the term; T. S. Eliot introduced it "rather casually" into "Hamlet and His Problems" (1919), where he argued that the only way to express emotion in art is "by finding" "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion," so that when the external facts are given "the emotion is immediately evoked." His test case: Hamlet, "most certainly an artistic failure," whose emotion exceeds the facts of the play, against Lady Macbeth's "complete adequacy of the external to the emotion." Later critics doubt that any one formula can evoke one emotion and no other.

For the writer the term is imagery with a job description: build the objects, the situation, the room, and let them carry the feeling. A correlative that recurs hardens into symbol and motif.