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In his essay "Hamlet," T. S. Eliot not only introduced a new term to the literary-critical lexicon—objective correlative—but also performed an audacious act of literary revisionism by questioning the aesthetic merits of one of Shakespeare's most widely admired plays. "Few critics have ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary," Eliot begins, and goes on to argue that this play fails precisely where Macbeth had succeeded: it does not build the necessary basis of symbolic action upon which to predicate Prince Hamlet's emotional outpourings and his descent into madness. It lacks, in Eliot's now famous formulation, an objective correlative between its action and emotion, "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of the particular emotion; such that when the facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked."
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Adam Kirsch's The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets uses the same concept to perform a less radical act of literary revisionism. Kirsch wants to resituate the so-called "Confessional" poets—John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and Delmore Schwartz—as Eliot's "rebellious heirs," prodigal modernists rather than sensationalists who commodified their most painful, private experiences. The vital link between this group and their immediate forebears, Kirsch argues, was their mastery of the art of the objective correlative, which enabled them to "transform experience into art" in a much more valuable and permanent way than their common caricature would allow. "The suffering that afflicted this group of poets," writes Kirsch in explanation of the book's title, "becomes significant only because they examined it with the surgeon's rigor, detachment, and skill."
If there is any doubt about what this "common caricature" entails, a brief anecdote might help. Imagine the otherwise gentle, soft-spoken poet Robert Bly shouting to a group of college students, "I don't want to see any more poems about your grandfather! Don't even think about your grandfather when you write poems, at least not if you're planning to turn them in!" By 1994, when Bly actually did shout these words to a class he was teaching at New York University, many poets had come to resent the shameless self-revelation and over-reliance on autobiography characteristic of much contemporary poetry and especially epidemic in the "workshop." Many blamed the Confessional movement for this turn, which they considered narcissistic in the extreme, and had perhaps subconsciously begun to write off poets such as Lowell, Plath, and Jarrell. Bly, with a cooler head in a subsequent class, characterized the poetry of the younger Confessional poet Anne Sexton as, "I've been traumatized; let me tell you about it. That'll be five dollars, please."
With that in mind, the ways in which the original Confessional poets diverged from modernism might be obvious. They no longer bought into Eliot's notion of poetry as an "escape from personality." They resisted the idea of the poem as pure object, its text entirely separate from its author. They felt no need to make poems that were purposefully cryptic or so verbally embroidered as to be almost illegible. They leaned away from élitism and high culture and toward a demotic, Whitmanic mode. But, argues Kirsch, born as they were into a literary-cultural milieu dominated by New Critical doctrines, they did carry a modern sense of artfulness and perhaps even artifice into their creative work. Berryman and early Lowell are a testament to this, writing with a formal intensity bordering on madness. The Confessional poets also wrote about many things besides their personal lives and troubles—Lowell's later work is marked by political concerns, for example. These poets' debt to modernism was so sure, in fact, that "the word 'confession' obscures much more than it reveals," Kirsch suggests, especially when it is applied to Lowell, whose work was "not personal and memoiristic but allegorical and cosmological."
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