Abstract
This paper draws together as many as possible of the clues and pieces of the puzzle
surrounding T.S. Eliot’s “infamous” literary term “objective correlative.” Many different
scholars have claimed many different sources for the term, in Pound, Whitman, Baudelaire,
Washington Allston, Santayana, Husserl, Nietzsche, Newman, Walter Pater, Coleridge,
Russell, Bradley, Bergson, Bosanquet, Schopenhauer and Arnold. This paper aims to rewrite
this list by surveying those individuals who, in different ways, either offer the truest claim to
being the source of the term, or contributed the most to Eliot’s development of it: Allston,
Husserl, Bradley, and Bergson. What the paper will argue is that Eliot’s possible inspiration
for the term is more indebted to the idealist tradition, and Bergson’s aesthetic development of
it, than to the phenomenology of Husserl.