This term showed up on a question on my practice GRE and I have yet to understand it. Here's what I've read so far...
In his essay, "Hamlet and his Problems", Eliot says "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."
In my humble reading, it sounds like Eliot is saying that emotion is triggered when readers see or experience a certain important object/situation/chain of events...like a symbol. That seems like a very simplistic reading to me. Would someone care to explain it in more depth? And could someone give an example of an objective correlative used in a novel?
It's not terribly important that I understand the term deeply, just that I'm able to recognize an instance of it when given a passage of prose.