Evoking Emotion: The Objective Correlative and the Pathetic Fallacy
A lecture by Jonathan McClure
Overview — 0:00:22
Two terms for thinking about how emotion works in writing—primarily associated with poetry but equally applicable to prose.
The objective correlative, made famous by T.S. Eliot, is a theory for why showing works better than telling: find the external object or chain of events that corresponds to the emotion you want to convey, show that thing, and the emotion will be evoked in the reader automatically—or nearly so.
The pathetic fallacy, coined by the critic John Ruskin, is in some ways its inverse: the phenomenon of emotion acting on our perception of external objects, causing us to see what isn’t there. The cruel crawling foam. The foam isn’t cruel—but the person describing it is in grief, and that grief colors the world.
Both are useful tools for thinking about how to evoke emotion in writing. Both have limitations worth understanding. And the tension between them opens up a richer picture of how the best poems actually work.
The Objective Correlative — 0:01:14
Eliot’s formulation — 0:01:14
In his essay on Hamlet, Eliot argues—rather provocatively—that Shakespeare’s most famous play is a dramatic failure. His reason:
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.
His argument about Hamlet is that the character’s emotions are in excess of the facts as they appear. We have Hamlet feeling at us, but there’s no adequate external object or chain of events to ground that feeling—so it doesn’t fully land. We’re left with a character generating emotion that we’re supposed to simply accept rather than independently feel.
The simpler version: if you show someone a video of puppies playing, they get the aw. If you tell them that puppies are cute, they receive a fact. The objective correlative is the theory behind why that difference exists.
Eliot borrowed the term from a critic of painting—originally it described how visual art conveys emotion, since painting can only work through images. Eliot imported it into thinking about writing, arguing that the same principle applies: come up with the external object that corresponds to the interior state, show it, and the emotion is released in the reader.
Limitations — 0:04:02
The concept is useful but oversimplified. Eliot’s version presents it almost like a chemical equation: combine the right words in the right order and produce a predictable effect in any reader. This is clearly wrong, for a few reasons.
It doesn’t account for cultural context. Black is associated with death in many Western cultures; in some Eastern cultures, white carries that meaning. An image of black shrouds might evoke grief for one reader and nothing particular for another. Similarly, Eliot’s own poetry demands that readers know untranslated ancient Greek, obscure Anglo-Saxon mythology, and layers of literary-historical context—without which many of his poems simply don’t work. His attitude was roughly: well, read more. But that’s a different thing from claiming the right external facts automatically produce emotion in anyone.
It also doesn’t account for tone, voice, and the biographical context of the speaker. And it assumes a shared frame of reference that may or may not exist. Some frame of reference is necessary for communication at all, but Eliot ignores the question of whether that frame is actually shared.
The concept is still useful as a starting point—as a theory for why image-driven, concrete writing tends to evoke emotion more powerfully than abstract statement. But it’s a tendency, not a formula.
Three Examples — 0:12:27
Jack Gilbert, “Michiko Dead” — 0:12:27
Gilbert’s practice is to write about himself in the third person, and this short poem uses that remove to describe grief without ever naming it. Michiko was his wife. The poem reads:
He manages like somebody carrying a box / that is too heavy, first with his arms underneath. / When their strength gives out, he moves the hands forward, / hooking them on the corners, pulling the weight against his chest. / He moves his thumb slightly when the fingers begin to tire / and it makes different muscles take over. Afterward / he carries it on his shoulder until the blood drains out / of the arm that is stretched up to steady the box / and the arm goes numb. But now the man can hold underneath again, / so that he can go on without ever putting the box down.
The word grief never appears. Sad never appears. What we get instead is a precise, sustained description of carrying something too heavy—with every adjustment, every shift of weight, every numbness—and it maps perfectly onto grief at every level simultaneously. The vehicle is true (this is exactly what it’s like to carry a heavy box for a long time), and the tenor is true (this is what grief feels like: the constant adjusting, the discovering of new muscles, the going on without ever putting it down).
The final line does the most work. Going on without ever putting the box down: the grief is not something he will set aside and recover from. In some form, he carries this always. He doesn’t have to say so. It’s built into the image.
One participant noted that the title is part of the poem—without knowing Michiko is his dead wife, we might read it only as a meditation on physical labor. The biographical context is necessary. This is the objective correlative working, but with an external assist that Eliot’s clean formulation doesn’t quite account for.
William Stafford, “Traveling Through the Dark” — 0:18:34
A man driving at night finds a dead doe at the edge of the road. He knows the road well—it’s narrow, and a deer left on the shoulder could cause a swerve and another death. The right thing to do is push her into the river below. He stops, gets out, and discovers she’s pregnant. The fawn is still alive. And yet.
The poem doesn’t tell us about moral complexity. It enacts it. We get the warmth of her side under his hand; the fawn still, never to be born; the car’s engine purring, its lights glowing—waiting, as if the whole world is waiting with him; the wilderness listening. He thought hard for all of us. Then he pushes her over the edge.
As one participant observed, the poem’s power is as much about ideas as emotions—the live and the dead, the living and the doomed, humanity and nature, individual judgment and collective consequence. These ideas are never stated abstractly. They come through the particular: a man standing in exhaust fumes in the dark, the wilderness listening, the only possible choice that still feels wrong.
The structure of realization—oh, the deer is dead; oh, she’s pregnant; oh, the fawn is alive; oh, there’s no world in which it survives—is part of the poem’s effect. We arrive at the same terrible position the speaker does, step by step, through the same objects and events.
Elizabeth Bishop, “The Fish” — 0:23:54
Bishop catches a tremendous fish. He doesn’t fight. He’s battered, venerable, ancient-looking—his skin like old wallpaper with faded roses, his gills working in the terrible oxygen. She imagines his insides: the white flesh packed like feathers, the dramatic reds and blacks of entrails, the pink swim bladder like a big peony. She looks into his eyes—far larger than hers, shallower, yellowed, the irises backed with tarnished tinfoil—and they don’t look back. It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light.
Then she notices his jaw: five old pieces of fish line hanging from it—four lines and a wire leader, with the swivel still attached, and five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth. He’d been caught before. He’d broken free. The broken lines hang like medals, like a five-haired beard of wisdom.
She stares and stares. Victory fills the boat. Oil on the water spreads a rainbow around the rusted engine, to the bailer, the sun-cracked thwarts, the locks on their strings. Until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow. And she lets the fish go.
The poem never states what she’s decided or why. What we get instead is the accumulation of detail—the progressive anthropomorphizing of the fish (he gets a beard of wisdom, though the eyes don’t look back), the revelation of his history through the hooks, the turn from the fish outward to the boat, the oil, the unexpected rainbow—until the release feels inevitable and right, even though nothing has been explained.
Participants noted: the tension between humanizing the fish and keeping him genuinely alien (the eyes don’t return the stare; they shift like the tipping of an object toward the light). The movement inward and then back out—surface to imagined interior to surface to the wider world. The hooks as both wounds and a history of survival, possibly representing something beyond the literal fish. The rainbow as a sudden sense of universal connection, or of beauty found in unlikely places (oil on bilge water), arriving at just the moment of decision.
The emotion nothing easily boiled down. Something about encounter with a very alien other; something about recognizing a long life preceding this moment; something about what victory means when the thing you’ve caught had already survived so much. She doesn’t have to say any of it. The fish does.
Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro” — 0:36:54
A single image, offered without comment:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.
Faces in a crowd made ghostly, made suddenly botanical—something about beauty mixed with anonymity, with the transient, with the apparent and the real. It’s hard to articulate the feeling precisely, and that might be the point: the image produces something that resists paraphrase. A pure example of the objective correlative at its most compressed.
The Pathetic Fallacy — 0:37:55
Ruskin’s term describes the inverse: emotion acting on our perception of external objects, producing falseness in our impressions of the world. The cruel crawling foam. The foam isn’t cruel, doesn’t crawl—the speaker’s grief projects those qualities onto it. If you’re sad, the clouds look sad. The world reflects you back to yourself.
The term sounds harsh today—pathetic suggests contemptible, fallacy suggests error—but at the time it meant only emotional falseness. Ruskin was observing a phenomenon, not entirely condemning it.
The classic exercise associated with this idea comes from John Gardner: describe a barn from the point of view of a father whose son has just died, then describe the same barn from the point of view of a murderer—without mentioning death, grief, murder, or any of the forbidden words. The same object described in each speaker’s emotional state will read completely differently. The emotion shapes the perception, and that shaped perception is what the reader receives.
Where it tips into trouble — 0:40:44
The risk of relying heavily on pathetic fallacy is sentimentality—Oscar Wilde’s formulation being the luxury of an emotion without having to pay for it. Emotions in excess of what the external facts can support. Hamlet, by Eliot’s reading, is all interior and insufficient exterior.
There’s also the risk of what The Poet’s Companion calls interiority done badly: Here I stand looking out my window and I am important. The self is completely self-absorbed, asserting its own significance without opening outward to anything a reader can share.
Tony Hoagland, “Personal” — 0:44:18
The poem opens with a rebuke that the speaker then systematically refuses:
Don’t take it personal, they said, but I did, I took it all quite personal—the breeze and the river, and the color of the fields, the price of grapefruit and stamps, the wet hair of women in the rain. And I cursed what hurt me, and I praised what gave me joy, the most simple-minded of possible responses…
It goes on: the government reminded him of his father with its deafness and its laws; the weather reminded him of his mother with her tropical squalls. Enjoy it while you can, they said. Get over it, they said at the school of broken hearts. But I couldn’t, and I didn’t, and I don’t believe in the clean break. I believe in the compound fracture served with a sauce of dirty regret…
The trees look seasick in the wind. The final image: You were that yellow caboose the moon disappearing over a ridge of cloud. / I was the dog chained in some fool’s backyard barking and barking trying to convince everything else to take it personal too.
The whole poem is pathetic fallacy—imposing interior experience on external objects, wanting the world to reflect you and finding it doesn’t. But even as it does this, it generates its own objective correlatives: the dog chained in someone’s yard, barking at the indifferent world, is a genuinely powerful external image for wanting everyone else to feel what you’re feeling.
One participant raised a sharp observation: the fish’s eyes glinting like tinfoil is an encounter with something directly external. The compound fracture served with a sauce of dirty regret is an encounter with someone’s persona—their narrative about themselves. There’s a layer of secondness to the latter. It’s more like encountering the reaches of someone’s mind than sharing the world with them. Frederick noted this distinction: direct sensory experience tends to land with particular immediacy; language that’s highly interior invites us into someone’s self-conception, which is a valid thing to offer but operates differently, at greater remove.
Jonathan pushed back gently: Hoagland works, when he works, because even as he’s talking about himself he’s getting at wider concerns—the poem is really a debate about how much of ourselves we’re allowed to bring to our experience of the world. And for many readers, the empathetic path in is real: even if the compound fracture line doesn’t map to your own experience, it’s valuable and enriching to understand that it maps to someone’s.
The observation stands that Hoagland is polarizing—and that polarity may itself be diagnostic. Poems that stay close to direct external experience tend to be more widely accessible; poems that rely heavily on the speaker’s idiosyncratic interior reach some readers deeply and leave others cold.
The Issa Haiku: A Limit Case — 0:42:01
A haiku by Issa, in Robert Hass’s translation: The world of dew / is the world of dew— / and yet… and yet…
On its own, it’s pleasant. With context, it breaks the heart. Two things you need to know: within Buddhism, dew is a traditional symbol for the impermanence of all earthly things, the lesson that one shouldn’t cling to worldly desires because they fade like dew in the morning. And Issa wrote this on the anniversary of his child’s death.
The haiku becomes a poem about someone who understands, intellectually and spiritually, that he shouldn’t grieve—that the teachings he holds dear say this world is all just dew in the morning—and who cannot stop. The and yet is the whole thing. The grief survives the philosophy.
None of that is present in the image itself. The image is clear and the Buddhist resonance is accessible to those who know it, but the biographical fact—that this specific man is in this specific grief—is what makes it devastating rather than merely thoughtful. The objective correlative here is a functioning image that requires external information to produce its full effect. A reminder that Eliot’s clean formula always depends on shared context that the formula itself can’t guarantee.
The Synthesis — 1:00:15
Both concepts, pushed to extremes, fail. Pure objective correlative—image stripped of all voice, all interiority, all personal signature—can become hostilely impersonal, as if the emotional complexity of being alive has been excluded. Pure pathetic fallacy—emotion all the way down, the world entirely filtered through a self—can become self-indulgent, leaving readers outside in the cold.
The better way to think of it: as a spectrum. The question for any piece of writing is where along that spectrum you want to be, and whether you’re there intentionally or accidentally. Most good poems use both: they anchor emotion in concrete external objects and events, and they bring the speaker’s particular perception and voice to bear on those objects in ways that add emotional valence. The fish’s eyes glinting like tinfoil is both a precise physical observation and a perception colored by the speaker’s gradual recognition of the fish as something remarkable. The dog barking in the yard is both an objective correlative for frustrated interiority and a self-description that reveals how Hoagland sees himself in relation to the world.
The practical question a writer might ask: is the emotion in my poem grounded in something external—image, object, sequence of events—that a reader can inhabit alongside me? And: does my voice and perspective, brought to bear on that external thing, add rather than replace the experience of it? When both are working, the poem tends to work. When the external is too thin to support the emotion, or the interior is so dense that the external disappears, something usually goes wrong.
Recommended Reading — 0:57:44
The Poet’s Companion by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux—a practical craft book that includes discussion of interiority, objectivity, and related concerns, with useful examples of each approach done well and done badly. Jonathan recommended it particularly for writers working through questions about voice and how much of the self to bring explicitly into a poem.
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