Kenneth Burke at Seventy

...The one he honors is the dialectical or critical kind, and the one he neglects is the lyrical or radical kind...

...Burke is scornful of the "technological psychosis" of present-day science, he regards the products touted over our air waves as "the damnedest batch of poisons and quack drugs," and he is preoccupied to the point of obsession with the excretory processes (or, as he might say, he has a "cloacal psychosis...

...In an essay on Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Burke finds the book coming "to stylistic fulfillment in the accents of lamentation," with its perverse actions as secular forms of religious themes, so that, for example, "The motives of Christian vigil become transformed into the 'night watch' of women like Nora in love or like Robin prowling...

...In Burke's curious reversal of Freud, sexual fantasies "are a displacement of political motives," or can be (perhaps his own political motives have been displaced similarly...

...Burke's tone is now stoic rather than optimistic, as when he subscribes to Freud's "ultimate qualified resignation" rather than Norman O. Brown's heady Utopianism...

...The new book displays the vast range of Burke's operations at present...

...Of Burke's political concerns of the '30s, little is visible in this book except an overwhelming detestation (which I share) of our presence in Vietnam...

...He is a liberator, a comic humanist, and a great man...

...In one of his aspects (not the one most congenial to me) he is a kind of philosopher, an original thinker and system-builder...

...Of course the book has flaws, some of them the defects of Burke's qualities...

...like a musical score...

...identifies his technique for "leaving implicit the kind of tonal transformation that Hopkins makes explicit...

...just about any branch of knowledge you can name, even, warily and to his own purposes, a little science (he uses "nova" to mean "the sudden flaring forth of a term...

...differentiates among the terms "intuitions," "concepts," and "ideas" in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason...

...A volume of his collected poems will come out in the fall...

...or arguing that Freud's Love and Death principles "are not directly antithetical," although he surely knows that "Love" is Freud's "Life" term...

...Like the only living critic comparable...

...relates Roethke's theories of poetic language to those of Dante...

...This month he is being inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where all the immortals (save Kenneth Burke) wear three names...

...Dramatism relies heavily on Aristotle's "entelechial principle," the principle of perfection, in taking things to the end of the line...

...It is wordy, repetitious, sometimes arid, carelessly edited, and with far too much self-quotation and self-citation...

...Mallarme's "Pure" Poetry, and some of Burke's own works...

...Burke occasionally falls into tautology, as when he says that "The negative as such offers a basis for a tendency to think in antitheses," which is only an elaborate way of saying "The negative offers a basis for negating...

...Burns, who fraternized with dispossessed field mice," he writes, or a word "stirs up a belfry of bat thoughts...

...Half the essays in Language as Symbolic Action deal with specific works, and Burke's practical criticism is a marvel...

...His two giant volumes on motivation, A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives, have been reprinted together in one mammoth paperback (Meridian, 896 pp., $3.95...

...The worst fault of the book is a confusion of function or entelechial end with origin, and the consequent assumption that Burke is qualified to pronounce on origins in technical areas...

...This same freshness gets into his style????not always, but often...

...Last month, Brandeis University gave him its special award for Notable Creative Achievement...

...He is simply the finest literary critic in the world, and perhaps the finest since Coleridge...

...Flaubert's Temptation of St...

...Burke's thoroughness is fantastic, whether he is indexing all the key words in the three plays of Aeschylus' Oresteia (Burke's special form of critical indexing is explained and illustrated in "Fact, Inference, and Proof in the Analysis of Literary Symbolism" in Terms for Order), or chasing what he calls "the Demonic Trinity" (the burlesque analogue of the Trinity in the interrelationship of the fecal, the urinary, and the genital) through Alice in Wonderland, Wagner's Ring Cycle...

...Mankind's only hope is a cult of comedy," Burke writes, since "the cult of tragedy is too eager to help out with the holocaust...

...The piece is the best imaginable refutation, even to its title, of the statement John Crowe Ransom made in "An Address to Kenneth Burke" in 1942: "There are two kinds of poetry (or at least of 'literature') and Burke analyzes one kind with great nicety, and honors it, but shows too little interest in the other...

...Last June, Bennington College, where he taught for 20 years, awarded him an honorary Litt...

...In his own spinnings Burke is endlessly fertile and resourceful...

...At times he produces a tiny lyric ("a guarded and guardian garden") or a simile that is a thumbnail ballad ("like outlaws in the antique woods converging upon the place where a horn has sounded...

...He shows how certain dreams function to wake the sleeper when his bladder is full, and from this presumes to correct Freud on dream origins...

...The Philosophy of Literary Form, a collection of essays first published in 1941, has just appeared in a new edition (Louisiana State University Press, 454 pp., $7.95...

...Now a collection of his essays written in the '50s and '60s has appeared as Language as Symbolic Action (University of California Press, 514 pp., $10.00...

...Anthony, Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound...

...He has been in the literary business for half a century, but he has never lost the quality of wonder: "Almost breathtaking in their implications," he exclaims, of a set of terminological transformations in Flaubert...

...Burke is at times owlish, as when he follows Bergson in denying the existence of negatives in nature (such examples of "Thou shall not" as thorns and the rattlesnake's rattle, such examples of "it is not" as protective coloration and mimicry), then smuggles them in as pre-linguistic "primitive negatives...

...It is in his aspect as a literary critic that I find Burke most congenial...

...His fine novel, Towards a Better Life, published in 1932, was recently reprinted (University of California Press, 219 pp., $4.95...

...He is sometimes quite eloquent, particularly in endings...

...Burke calls his whole system "Dramatism," having taken "Ritual Drama as Hub" as far back as 1941, and defines Dramatism: "A theory of language, a philosophy of language based on that theory, and methods of analysis developed in accordance with the theory and the philosophy...

...In this, as in other respects, Burke is a quirky and characteristically American original thinker or philoso- pher, on the order of Thoreau or Veblen (or, as R. P. Blackmur once suggested, Charles S. Peirce...

...Language as Symbolic Action gives the reader a sense of sitting beside Burke as he works...

...A two-volume sampling from most of his books was published in 1964 {Perspectives by Incongruity and Terms for Order, edited by Stanley Edgar Hyman with the assistance of Barbara Karmiller, Indiana University Press, 200 and 198 pp., $6.95...

...In defining the poem as "instructions for performing...

...One need not be in the literary business long," Burke remarks, "to detect a considerable amount of whistling in the dark here...

...I. A. Richards, Burke manages to combine his Aristotelian concern for structure with a Coleridgean concern for texture: the imaginative process, the tension of opposites, the language of poetry...

...he shows how myths function for such purposes as "governance" or attain entelechial perfection in their development, and from this presumes to decide how they originate...

...Kerineth Burke has been my master and friend for ?0 years...

...How closely dare we tie in things here...

...He is a philosopher of language, a study he calls "logology" (words about words), and of human motivation...

...The essay that I think the best of all, "The Vegetal Radicalism of Theodore Roethke...

...demonstrates Roethke's poetic vocabulary of "drip" and "root" by contrasting it with such diction in Eliot's "Burnt Norton" as "inoperancy" and "abstention...

...he will write, or, "And now I am already in a bit of trouble," or, "this would put us wholly to rout...

...He defines the "comic mood" as "essentially humane," and says of such comedy, "for these mean days, it is good medicine...

...Burke calls this activity "Poetics," as Aristotle did, and defines it in Aristotelian fashion as "an approach in terms of the poem's nature as a kind...

...shows how Roethke's "communicative verbs" work...

...D., the first degree of any sort to grace his name...

...Three critical studies of his work have so far been published...

...Burke goes to the same Coleridgean extreme that Richards reached in his famous "Definition of a Poem" in Principles of Literary Criticism, while making it compatible with an equally extreme Aristotelian emphasis on "the dynamics of form...

...and somehow brings all this to a focus in beautiful textual analysis of "The Lost Son" and other poems...

...in which "each species has aims intrinsic to itself...

...The essay on "Kubla Khan" is masterly, and its pursuit of the poem's connections with other writing by Coleridge makes the perfect complement to John Livingston Lowes' pursuit, in The Road to Xanadu, of the poem's sources in Coleridge's reading...

...Freud, here the victim, was a comparable sinner: he announced that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays of William Shakespeare...

...He taught me to think, and when I disagree with him, which is often, I wield weapons that he has forged...

...Wordsworth, and Lawrence...

...As a critic of other thinkers he is shrewd and perceptive, showing how Marshall McLuhan throws out "content" and then smuggles it back in as "information," or how Cleanth Brooks practices sociology "in the name of No Sociology...

...Burke is self-taught (more even than the rest of us, since he never finished college) and he is formidably self-taught: French, German, Latin, Greek, Hebrew...