Hamlet and His Problems Essay

Eliot offers, as we have seen, what has come to be called an ‘impersonal theory of poetic creation. ’ Eliot would not have denied either that poets have feelings or that poetry inspires certain feelings in the reader. He offers, rather, an account, centered around his notion of the objective correlative, of how such feelings enter the poem in the first place that differs significantly from the expressive model of poetry promulgated by the Romantics. In â€Å"Tradition and the Individual Talent,† you might recall, using a chemical analogy, Eliot compares the poet’s mind to a catalyst and the emotions and feelings (he draws a distinction between these two that is unclear) universally inspired by particular objects and events to two chemicals which react with each other only in the presence of the catalyst. The product of the ‘chemical’ reaction is a poem which, when properly executed, then in turn inspires the same emotions and feelings in its audience. In short, the poet does not inject his personal emotions into the poem, that is, the best poetry does not ‘express’ the personality (thoughts and feelings) of the poet concerned. In â€Å"Hamlet and Its Problems,† Eliot gives further insight into exactly how emotions are included in poems without the poet’s own feelings becoming personally involved. According to Eliot, the best poets seek to verbally describe suitable objects which, when included in the poem, are responsible for generating a particular kind of emotion that, in turn, strikes the appropriate chord in the reader. The ‘object’ captured in words in this way serves, as Eliot puts it, as the ‘correlative’ of a particular kind of emotion. Eliot puts it this way: the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art 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; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. 124-5) For example, the description of death inevitably involves the generation of sadness and related emotions in the audience as it would if it happened on real life. Given that Eliot is of the view that the best poetry is divorced from the personal feelings and involvement of the poet, the death described has little to do with the poet’s personal experiences of mortality. From this point of view, Eliot contends, the reason why Shakespeare’s play Hamlet is a failure is that the â€Å"essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother† (124). However, the character Hamlet is â€Å"dominated by an emotion† (125) that is â€Å"in excess of the facts as they appear† (125). That is, the play Hamlet’s difficulty is that the character Hamlet’s â€Å"disgust is occasioned by his mother, but . . . is mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her† (125). In short, the in fact not entirely unsympathetic figure of Gertrude in the play is not an adequate object for the emotions which she is meant to generate in her son. The play fails because Gertrude is a badly executed character who does not function as she is intended to by Shakespeare and thus fails as an objective correlative for emotions of disgust.