Hamlet and His Problems Essay

Eliot offers, as we brook seen, what has come out to be called an im individualised theory of poetic creation. Eliot would non have denied either that poets have feelings or that verse inspires certain feelings in the reader. He offers, rather, an account, centered around his opinion of the targetive related to, of how such feelings enter the meter in the first place that differs importantly from the expressive model of poetry proclaim by the Romantics.In Tradition and the idiosyncratic Talent, you might recall, using a chemical substance analogy, Eliot comp bes the poets mind to a throttle and the emotions and feelings (he draws a distinction between these two that is unclear) universally inspired by grumpy objects and events to two chemicals which react with each former(a) only in the presence of the catalyst. The harvest-festival of the chemical reaction is a song which, when properly executed, then in incline inspires the same emotions and feelings in its audien ce.In short, the poet does non 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 insight into on the dot how emotions are included in poems without the poets own feelings becoming personally involved. jibe to Eliot, the best poets seek to verbally advert suitable objects which, when included in the poem, are responsible for generating a particular winsome of emotion that, in turn, strikes the appropriate concord in the reader.The object captured in speech in this way serves, as Eliot puts it, as the correlative of a particular build 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 jurisprudence of that particular emotion such that when the foreign facts, which must ter minate in sensorial experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. 124-5) For example, the rendering of death 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 weigh that the best poetry is divorced from the personal feelings and involvement of the poet, the death described has gnomish to do with the poets personal experiences of mortality.From this forefront of view, Eliot contends, the reason why Shakespeares work Hamlet is a failure is that the necessary emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty suffer (124). However, the character Hamlet is dominated 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 evil is occasioned by his arrest, but . . . is mother is not an adequate equivalent for it his disgust envelops and exceeds her (125). In short, the in fa ct not entirely unsympathetic figure of Gertrude 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 function as she is intended to by Shakespeare and thus fails as an objective correlative for emotions of disgust.