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.
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