i, tiresias

(Feat. Lia Williams, Ted Hughes, Thomas Stearns Eliot)

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. ― T.S. Eliot (Ft. J.W.Goethe, Mr. J. M. Robertson', Professor Stoll, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Kyd & William Shakespeare) – Hamlet and His Problems How does  The Waste Land embody an objective correlate? Or, put another way, what set(s) of objects within the poem effect emotions from a reader? Half the intrigue of the work seems to stem from the ambiguity behind such an answer.

(French, for the many-sided madnesses) "You could say that here and elsewhere Shakespeare and literary tradition in general stand in for sacred texts that would offer some kind of guide to action and some source of meaning."

The relevance of this quoted epistolary excerpt to the overall criticism (and meta-criticism) of The Waste Land  is marginal at best, and the young future president doesn't mention Tiresias even once.