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In her fine 1989 essay "T.S. Eliot at 101" (collected in Fame & Folly,
1996), Cynthia Ozick examines the fluctuations of Eliot's influence and
reputation over the decades, as well as the effect of posthumous
biographical revelations upon the reading of his verse. One specific
aspect of Ozick's survey is an investigation of, and to some extent a
disparagement of, the objective correlative. Quoting from Eliot's essay
"Tradition and the Individual Talent," she notes his argument that the
writer can employ "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events" to
create an "exact equivalence" to an emotion. Further, he says that such
an equivalence or correlative is the "only way of expressing emotion in
the form of art." Ozick details the direct link from Eliot's argument to
the New Criticism's dismissal of biography and psychology in the
interpretation of poems and then to the revelations of the pain in
Eliot's private life in the biographies that followed his death. The
objective correlative is, she says, "suddenly decipherable as no more
than a device to shield the poet from the raw shame of confession. Eliot
is now unveiled as a confessional poet above all. . . ."
 While both statements may be true, they sidestep what is for me the more
important issue--whether Eliot's defense of the objective correlative is
valid--and turn instead to the wholly different issue of why he applied
it in his own work and why he defended it so powerfully. That is to say,
Ozick and the biographers leave the poems to take up the life. But
Eliot's life is not his poetry, no matter how inextricably the two may be
linked, and the poetry must stand or fall on its own merits, not on its
usefulness as a tool in examining the poet's inner life. Readers only
care about a writer's inner life because they have already been snared by
his writings. For this reason Eliot's defense of the objective
correlative is exactly correct, and we should not be concerned at all if
he employed it as a mask to hide his emotions, but only if he employed it
well.
Many of us are embarrassed and chagrined at the exuberant and
straight-faced declamation of bare emotion that is the hallmark of so
much Romantic verse: precisely the opposite operation of the dictum
"Show--don't tell." We are not invited by these poems to experience a
situation or setting which provokes the poet's rapture or despair--instead
we are made to listen to the poet's recitation. No matter how
secretive Eliot's motivation may have been for championing the objective
correlative, the effect was--and is--to spur the writer to more
involving and evocative writing, writing which engages the reader's
intellectual and emotional investment rather than presenting him with a
given. To put it another way, "The Waste Land" worked for readers for
half a century as a deeply moving embodiment of grief, despair and the
longing for rebirth, without the readers' awareness that specific lines
may have reflected his wife's hysteria. And if the poem, 80 years old in
2003, is to survive another 80 years, it will do so because it works as
an entity on its own, without the need for Eliot's biographical gloss.
Later in the essay, Ozick goes so far as to say, "When the personal is
exposed, the objective correlative is annihilated." While that may be
true for the individual reader who has, in an individual instance,
aligned Eliot's biography and a specific sequence of lines of verse, it
is not true for the objective correlative in general, or for any reader
who turns only to the poem and not to the life. Ozick admits,
immediately after the sentence just quoted, that "the objective
correlative has won out, after all, in a larger way. . . . [I]t has
formidably sufficed as an 'objective equivalence' for the public malaise
of generations." This is a step in the right direction, but does not go
far enough. The objective correlative (if not "The Waste Land" itself)
has won out, and will continue to win out, because it is a tool to more
vivid and evocative writing, not because it provides writers with
privacy, though God knows that--after 40 years of confessionalism and
its discontents--we could do with more desire for privacy among our
writers.
In the closing pages of her essay Ozick delineates the shrinking of
Eliot's importance and relevance and nods to the vast shifts in the
processes of writers since the days when Eliot was god. But she does not
return to the objective correlative and does not seem to realize that its
formulation was perhaps Eliot's one major contribution to world
literature or that it is an implement far too marvelous to be retired by
one poet's biography.
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