This article aims to interpret T. S. Eliot’s doctrine of the objective correlative in terms of the European tradition of organicism. A consideration of the organic implications in Eliot’s major critical concepts, such as “a whole of feeling,” “unified sensibility,” and “depersonalization,” reminds us that Aristotle, Longinus, and Horace also highly valued the organic relation between the part and the whole and the organic unity of thought and feeling in great classical poetry. S. T. Coleridge had imported organic ideas from German thinkers and applied them to his Shakespearean criticism. Refuting the neo-classical view that Shakespeare failed to give an adequate verbal form and organized structure to his talent, Coleridge insisted that “no work of genius dares want its appropriate form,” and eulogized Shakespeare’s organic verbal structure equal to his genius. But, contrary to Coleridge, Eliot underestimated Hamlet as an artistic failure on the ground that Shakespeare could not find the objective correlative equivalent to Hamlet’s bafflement. However, it is worth noting that in the course of denouncing Hamlet, Eliot invented his doctrine of the objective correlative, which is an adoption of the organic principle inherited from S. T. Coleridge and Gottfried Leibniz. In his Knowledge and Experience, Eliot noticed that, having essential organic features, Leibniz’s windowless monad was very similar to F. H. Bradley’s concepts of the finite centre and immediate experience. In these concepts of holistic and empirical idealism, the distinctions between the subjective and the objective, spirit and matter, self and the world, feeling and image, and form and content cannot be maintained for their mutual interdependence. So, it should be said that the concept of the objective correlative was a special application of Eliot’s general principle of “the unity of feeling and objectivity,” for feeling and objectivity are only discriminated aspects of the whole experience. He remarked that there was the mutual inclination of mental feeling and verbal image to react upon one another so inexplicably that the relation should be said to be organic. Therefore, the organic features implied in his critical concepts and, in particular, the doctrine of the objective correlative confirms that he achieved a rapprochement between modern poetics and traditional authority.

This article aims to interpret T. S. Eliot’s doctrine of the objective correlative in terms of the European tradition of organicism. A consideration of the organic implications in Eliot’s major critical concepts, such as “a whole of feeling,” “unified sensibility,” and “depersonalization,” reminds us that Aristotle, Longinus, and Horace also highly valued the organic relation between the part and the whole and the organic unity of thought and feeling in great classical poetry. S. T. Coleridge had imported organic ideas from German thinkers and applied them to his Shakespearean criticism. Refuting the neo-classical view that Shakespeare failed to give an adequate verbal form and organized structure to his talent, Coleridge insisted that “no work of genius dares want its appropriate form,” and eulogized Shakespeare’s organic verbal structure equal to his genius. But, contrary to Coleridge, Eliot underestimated Hamlet as an artistic failure on the ground that Shakespeare could not find the objective correlative equivalent to Hamlet’s bafflement. However, it is worth noting that in the course of denouncing Hamlet, Eliot invented his doctrine of the objective correlative, which is an adoption of the organic principle inherited from S. T. Coleridge and Gottfried Leibniz. In his Knowledge and Experience, Eliot noticed that, having essential organic features, Leibniz’s windowless monad was very similar to F. H. Bradley’s concepts of the finite centre and immediate experience. In these concepts of holistic and empirical idealism, the distinctions between the subjective and the objective, spirit and matter, self and the world, feeling and image, and form and content cannot be maintained for their mutual interdependence. So, it should be said that the concept of the objective correlative was a special application of Eliot’s general principle of “the unity of feeling and objectivity,” for feeling and objectivity are only discriminated aspects of the whole experience. He remarked that there was the mutual inclination of mental feeling and verbal image to react upon one another so inexplicably that the relation should be said to be organic. Therefore, the organic features implied in his critical concepts and, in particular, the doctrine of the objective correlative confirms that he achieved a rapprochement between modern poetics and traditional authority.

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organicism, organic unity. T. S. Eliot, objective correlative, S. T. Coleridge, Hamlet, monad