I just came across a good summary of the connection between emotions and objects in modernist poetry. As I said in class, Eliot gave New Criticism some of its vocabulary and approach. The term objective correlative comes from Eliot, for example, and here Charles Bressler summarizes what this means in his introduction to literary theory and practice:
"According to Eliot, the only way of expressing emotions through art is by finding an objective correlative, or a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, or reactions that can effectively awaken in the reader the emotional response the author desires without being a direct statement of that emotion. When the external facts are thus presented in the poem, they somehow coalesce (correlate), immediately evoking an emotion" (Bressler 58).
You might think of Marianne Moore's "The Fish," for example, in connection with this principle.
You might think of Marianne Moore's "The Fish," for example, in connection with this principle.
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