How did T. S. Eliot's criticism influence modern literature?
My critical pronouncements, particularly those concerning impersonality in art and the objective correlative, sought to steer poetry away from what I perceived as an excessive and unbridled expression of individual emotion. The poet, I argued, should not simply pour out his feelings, but rather find a correlative, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion. This, I believed, offered a more disciplined and effective means of conveying experience, allowing the reader to engage with the emotion through the presented imagery, rather than through direct authorial sentiment.
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