By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Contrary to popular belief, T. S. Eliot did not come up with the phrase ‘objective correlative’. However, he did co-opt that expression to describe one of his most famous and influential theories of literature, specifically in relation to Shakespeare’s work. What did Eliot mean by ‘objective correlative’?
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Function of Criticism’ is an influential 1923 essay by T. S. Eliot, perhaps the most important poet-critic of the modernist movement. In some ways a follow-up to Eliot’s earlier essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ from four years earlier, ‘The Function of Criticism’ focuses on the role of the critic as opposed to the creation of new works of art, although Eliot also draws some valuable comparisons between creative and critical work.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Often known simply as ‘Daffodils’ or ‘The Daffodils’, William Wordsworth’s lyric poem that begins ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ is, in many ways, the quintessential English Romantic poem.
Its theme is the relationship between the individual and the natural world, though those daffodils are obviously the most memorable image from the poem. Here is the poem we should probably correctly call ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, along with a short analysis of its themes, meaning, and language.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each’ is one of the most famous lines from a poem filled with famous lines. T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ has been called, by the critic Christopher Ricks, the best first poem in a first volume of poems: it opened Eliot’s debut collection, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917, having been first published two years earlier in Poetry magazine.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Dark House, by Which Once More I Stand’ is one canto (the seventh) from a much longer work of poetry, In Memoriam A. H. H. by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92). The poem shows Tennyson revisiting the home of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, whose untimely death in 1833 inspired the poem. Before we proceed to offer an analysis of this section of the poem, here’s a reminder of the ‘Dark house’ canto.