A Lot of Smarty-Pants Talk and Then a Poem

It's been a little bit since I've put on my professor corduroy jacket with elbow patches, so here's  a chance to put something in my pipe and smoke it. Writing a while back about T.S. Eliot got me interested again in his critical writings, basically how he would pontificate at length on his poetics and act like he's speaking as the Voice of Literature Itself instead of just some jerk who writes a lot. (By the way, thanks a lot for the whole Yankee-Goes-Limey act that paved the way for Madonna's atrocious Brit accent.)


One of his major tentpole theories was something called the Objective Correlative. Here's the idea, in my own irreverent SparkNotes understanding: poetry is not personal expression. In fact, it's the opposite. In a famous phrase, Eliot said, "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion." It's not about how YOU feel about a subject, it's about how the poem can free you from your own emotional attachments like a library nerd Buddha, allowing you to explore and communicate outside yourself.


How can this be accomplished? By following Uncle Tommy's Noble Truth: every emotion has a formula. There are certain things, ideas, images, places that will automatically and inevitably generate a desired emotional response in the listener. As the man himself puts it, "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."


It's a terrible phrase, really - it sounds like a programming language or a neurological disorder instead of what it is: a totally b.s. way to beg the question of how poetry relates to emotion for both author and audience. That's right: I'm calling the man out.


I question the very idea that there can be any singular set of ideas or formulations which will evoke a desired response, like you're ringing a dinner bell and waiting for your dogs to start drooling. As one of the most singularly self-involved and onanistic poets (and I say this with the utmost respect and adoration), OF COURSE he thinks that there is a magic equation that will make all of his readers feel the same way he does. His one true audience is himself: as the acme and exemplar of intellectual achievement in his era, how else could an intelligent reading audience respond but in the identical manner as he himself?


I call shenanigans. 


Before I give an example, I should make clear that I don't in any way liken myself to my beautiful, misguided idol of a poet laureate. But a while back I wrote a song mentioning, "The saddest thing I've ever seen is a closed-down Burger King." And it was an honest statement: seeing boarded-up windows, crappy motel art on the walls, broken-down drive-through signs... It was like the total failure of Western civilization to even keep up the jovial, artificial pretense our culture is based upon. 


Ditto for one of the other saddest things: Wal-Mart auto aisles at night. Seeing all the tires, toolboxes, pressure gauges, jugs of wiper fluid, floormats, mirror-mounted air fresheners... It's all so miserable seeing these items lined up expectantly, waiting like foster children for parents who will probably never come or abuse them if they do.


But just in my circle of acquaintances I've discussed this and found widely disparate views. One friend found the abandoned Burger King hysterically funny, like ripping off a clown mask to find Groucho Marx glasses underneath. Another thinks the sexiest smell in the world is an empty automotive aisle at any time of the day or night. 


If there is a magic spell you can cast with words which will immediately and unswervingly manipulate your audience into your desired psycho-emotional state, I'm still waiting to find it. I don't think Eliot got there, either. And po-mo intelligentsia like Baudrillard would find the whole enterprise quixotically and hilariously unattainable. 


So, with all respect due a giant of letters, I must disagree. You can find common points where a striking majority find an image or phrase which resonates across a broad spectrum of humanity. (Mostly you find it in crappy romantic comedies or big-budget action flicks, although there are exceptions.)


But we're a pretty diverse species, and we tend to resist being quantified, formulated and algebraically converted into equivalent terms of an equation. So there you have it - objective correlative. Big word, bad idea. 


Now shut up and have a cookie. Or a poem. How does this make you feel?

Secretary

Ted Hughes

If I should touch her she would shriek and weeping
Crawl off to nurse the terrible wound: all
Day like a starling under the bellies of bulls
She hurries among men, ducking, peeping,


Off in a whirl at the first move of a horn
At dusk she scuttles down the gauntlet of lust
Like a clockwork mouse. Safe home at last
She mends socks with holes, shirts that are torn,


For father and brother, and a delicate supper cooks:
Goes to bed early, shuts out with the light
Her thirty years, and lies with buttocks tight,
Hiding her lovely eyes until day break.