Here We Go Round The Prickly Pear
by Joshua Mei-Ling Dubrau I feel like I’m going round in circles thinking about Eliot’s formula for the ‘objective correlative’ as set out in my last post – ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion’. This seems to imply that the emotion, not the objects, comes first in the creative impulse. But does it? And does the dogmatic-sounding nature of the statement render it impractical for the composition or criticism of poetry – a mode to which the idea of formula is often anathema? In some types of poetry, generally…