Making Poetry Evocative

A good poem evokes emotions that linger long after the final line. How do poets accomplish this? Close attention to language and imagery matters—but so does the arrangement of those words and images. A poet’s work, whether the poet knows this or not, often works towards what T. S. Eliot called the “objective correlative.”

Let’s take a closer look at the arrangement of poetry, including Eliot’s seminal essay on objective correlatives.

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Close Study: “Burning the Old Year” by Naomi Shihab Nye

Retrieved from Poetry Foundation.

This gorgeous, image-heavy poem might take a few reads to fully grasp. The language feels a little obscure, particularly because of the poem’s interesting syntax and line breaks. Perhaps a year is like this, too—its meaning is better understood after it’s been looked over a few times.

Nonetheless, the craft in this piece is striking and remarkable. The central image of this poem is fire, but the poem doesn’t examine fire in the usual sense. Yes, fire destroys, but the poem itself doesn’t seem to find this destruction violent. Rather, it is necessary: most things about life are transient and impermanent, and the progression of time, like fire, is what makes each year carry onward. “So little is a stone” that sticks with us from one year to the next.

Notice how each stanza has a different relationship to fire, but none of them have negative connotations. The first stanza describes smoke as “marry[ing] the air”; the second stanza’s image of swirling fire is particularly beautiful. The third stanza is notable for its lack of fire, its description of absences—ironic, then, is the absence of fire in the text, and only a description of its aftermath.

Many contemporary poets end the poem somewhere thought provoking. In this case, the last stanza describes the speaker’s unfinished business as “crackling after the blazing dies.” This raises many questions. Why does the speaker feel those things have been swept in the fire? Can they not be accomplished next year? What is it about a year that makes it so sacred, it must be described as fire? Does our unfinished business call to us, make a sound? And does the blazing really die, or is it carried from day to day?

Good poetry does this—resonates with our own experiences, but also challenges them, forces us to think about our lives in different ways. You might not agree with the poem’s message or its images, and if that’s the case, use your disagreement as a prompt for your own poetry. How would you represent the transition of time in verse?

Craft Perspective: “Hamlet and His Problems” by T. S. Eliot

Retrieved here.

You do not need to read this entire essay: it is really only the last two paragraphs that we’re discussing. If you do want to read the full essay, Eliot levies an interesting critique against Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Ever the provocateur, Eliot argues that Hamlet is a failure of art. Most literary critics would strongly disagree with that, but the arguments Eliot sets forth are interesting nonetheless.

What matters to us poets is the idea of the “objective correlative.”

Here’s how Eliot defines the objective correlative:

“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.”

What does this mean? At its simplest, it means that, in any work of literature, an emotion can only be evoked if certain images are arranged precisely and intentionally. Those image should symbolize certain concepts and feelings, and they should be employed in such a way that they contribute to the whole poem’s mood and meaning.

Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem above is a great example of this. The juxtaposition of fire with the poem’s other images evokes a bittersweet sense of transition. Her attention to what’s flammable gives a sense of life’s impermanence: moth’s wings and notes from friends and poems and grocery lists, the minutiae of the quotidian, followed by the abstract—what we hoped to have done and didn’t in the last year. The poem ties the abstract to the concrete through language like “losses and leaves,” and also through the image of fire itself, which, like time, consumes almost everything eventually. Yet, the language of the poem isn’t angry or sad. If anything, it’s hopeful: despite life’s flammability, there is always the chance to begin again, and even an absence can “celebrate.”

Now, if the poem went on too long, talked too much about fire, provided too many (or too few) images, or commented on the violent nature of fire and time, the poem’s emotion would be lost to the reader.

Thus, the objective correlative is a kind of framework for achieving what a poem tries to achieve. There’s no science behind this, but close attention to poetry and language, as well as having a frequent writing practice, will help you hone your own images and emotions over time.

For more on this, check out our articles on symbolism and imagery:

• Symbolism in Literature
• 5+ Types of Imagery in Literature