Th.is article aims to interpret T. S. Eliot’s doctrine of th.e objective correlatÎve in terrns of th.e European tradition of organicism. A consideration of the organic implications in Eliot's major critical concepts, s찌u따c대h. as “ whole of fee터ling’r’”’ “끼un삐nt비i“fied sensibility," and "depersonalization," reminds us that Aristotle, Longinus, and Horace also highly valued the organic relation between the part and the whole and tbe organic unity of thought and feeling in great classical poetry. S. T. Coleridge had imported organic ideas from Gerrnan thinkers and applied tbem to bis Shakespearean criticism. Refuting the neo-classical view tbat Shakespeare failed to give an adequate verbal forrn and organized structure to his talent, Coleridge insisted that “no work of genius dares want its appropriate forrn," and eulogized Shakespeare’s organic verbal structure equal to his genius. But, contrary to Coleridge, Eliot underestimated Hamlet as an artistic failure on tbe ground that Shakespeare could n이 find the obj야tive correlative equivalent to Hamlet’s baff1ement. However, it is worth noting that in the course of denouncing Hamlet, Eliot invented his doctrine of the objective correlative, wbich is an adoption of the organic principle inherited from S. T. Coleridge and Gottfried Leibniz. In his Knowledge and Experience, Eliot noticed that, having essential organic features, Leibniz’s windowless monad was very similar to F. H. Bradley’s concepts of the finite centre and immediate experience. In these concepts of holistic and empirical idealism, the distinctions between the subjective and the objective, spirit and matter, self and the world, feeling and image, and forrn and content cann이 be maintained for their mutual interdependence. So, it should be said that the concept of the objective correlative was a special application of Eliot's general principle of “the unity of feeling and objectivity," for feeling and objectivilY are only discriminaled aspects of Ihe whole experience. He remarked Ihal there was Ihe mutual incJinalion of menlal feeling and verbal image 10 reacl upon one anolher so inexplicably that Ihe relalion should be said 10 be organic. Therefore, the organic features implied in his crilical concepls and, in particular, Ihe doctrine of Ihe 0비e이ive correlalive confirrns Ihal he achieved a rapprochement between modem poetics and Iradilional authority.

• 이윤섭(안양대학교) | Yoonsup Lee