Hamlet and His Problems Essay

Eliot offers, as we have seen, what has come to be called an achromatic theory of poetic creation. Eliot would not have denied either that poets have feelings or that verse inspires certain feelings in the reader. He offers, rather, an account, centered around his plan of the objective interchangeable, of how such feelings enter the poem in the first engineer that differs significantly from the expressive model of poetry promulgated by the Romantics.In Tradition and the Individual Talent, you might recall, using a chemical analogy, Eliot compares the poets 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 individually other only in the presence of the catalyst. The product of the chemical reply is a poem which, when properly executed, then in turn inspires the alike(p) 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 hamlet and Its Problems, Eliot gives further keenness into exactly how emotions are included in poems without the poets own feelings seemly personally involved. According to Eliot, the best poets seek to verbally describe desirable objects which, when included in the poem, are responsible for generating a particular manakin 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 force out in sensory experience, are gi ven, the emotion is immediately evoked. 124-5) For example, the description of expiry 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 part from the personal feelings and involvement of the poet, the death described has little to do with the poets personal experiences of mortality.From this point of view, Eliot contends, the reason why Shakespeares play Hamlet is a failure is that the essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother (124). However, the character Hamlet is prevail by an emotion (125) that is in excess of the facts as they appear (125). That is, the play Hamlets difficulty is that the character Hamlets aversion is occasioned by his mother, but . . . is mother is not an adequate equivalent for it his force back envelops and exceeds her (125). In short, the in fact not entirely unsympathetic form of Gertru de 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 mesh as she is intended to by Shakespeare and thus fails as an objective correlative for emotions of disgust.