John Keats’s and Suhrab Sipihri’s Poems in the Light of Objective Correlative

Abstract

What Eliot meant by objective correlative was the conversion of emotions, not through expression, but an outer correlative of inner feelings – this kind of evoking emotion in the preserver can transparently correspond with Keats’s theory of impersonality. For Keats, the process of poetic perception includes the poet’s sympathetic identification with natural objects during moments of intense observation when the poet loses himself into an object, experiencing the details of the object through heightened perceptions and intuiting qualities or realities of the object not otherwise perceived – an oft-cited example is Keats’s odes. Amazingly, this hypothesis about Keats’s theory of impersonality or simply objective correlative can be equated and aligned with the term called ‘abstraction’ and its prominent exponent, Suhrab Sipihri in Persian literature. Considering such a perspective in mind, the present study is to foreground the manifestation of the terms impersonality and abstraction or simply objective correlative in the poetical vocations of Keats and Sipihri who lived in two remote continents of the world: Asia and Europe.
Key words: Objective Correlative; Abstraction; Eliot; Sipihri; Emotion; Perception