Since the publication of A Grammar of Motives in 1945 Kenneth Burke has become firmly lodged in the consciousness of an influential group of American writers as a critic almost exquisitely rare, abounding with ideas and enviably in control of the wide range of new knowledge that characterizes the present century. If not widely read—if at times even unreadable—he has had a genuine influence on a few good critics, and, at a more general level, he has become a paradigm of the deliberately serious, a state of affairs to which his unreadability (such as it is) has no doubt contributed. 'Burke's ethical doctrine, the "neo-liberal ideal"', writes a recent and enthusiastic appraiser, 'advanced pan-realism definitely into the realm of the pragmatic'. So we see that Burke is not being taken lightly. (p. 254)

[His] criticism has the support and encouragement of a considerable group—and it is a group that has a good chance of growing in influence. This critical popularity is partly owing to the fact that although Burke has committed himself against the technological aspect of contemporary society he has evolved a 'methodology' of criticism that cannot help playing into the hands of those to whom technology may be much less present as a danger. In other words, though Burke's virtues are his own, he has certain qualities easily transmissible as vices at precisely that level he most thoroughly deplores. Another reason for a possible 'Burke boom' in America is that he has developed a vocabulary that insulates its user against the shock of the work of art itself—and it must be remembered that the American literary critic is naturally very sensitive about the distance that separates his own language and modes of feeling from the English literary tradition. To shift the Coleridgean phrase, he is uneasily aware that he must effect a willing suspension of nationality during the process of evaluation unless a distorted judgment is to result. To the unpleasantness of this situation Burke seems to have formulated an answer, or rather, a series of answers. 'Formulation' is, I think, the correct term here for there is little that is radically new in Burke. His originality consists chiefly in the creation of a vocabulary so well oiled and metallic that one would almost swear the machine is wholly a new thing. At any rate, it is a 'machine' in which those disciples who wish to put it to such uses will be able to speed away from any very exacting evaluation of a work of art without, in fact, displaying a noticeable cowardice during the process of escape. And finally, Burke's criticism represents an approach to literature sufficiently specialized to become the vested interest of a group. (p. 255)

[There are] three central problems in Burke's criticism: (1) the manner in which he numerically individuates poems; (2) the practical way in which he translates a poem into Symbolic Action; and (3) the way he analyses Symbolic Action in terms of ritual.

1. By the problem of individuation is meant the manner in which a poem may claim to be itself. Does it exist by virtue of an ultimately inviolable identity, or does it possess its final and finest meaning only in terms of an organization of principles (however complex) that can be wholly explained away? Burke seems to wish to explain the poem entirely in terms of principles—at least the poem insofar as it exists as a verbal object. He can always, of course, step across the threshold into the Symbolic Act and confront such an accusation with the reply that he is actually stressing the dramatistic content, the human aspect of poetry; but I wish to suggest later that the transition is a questionable one as he effects it, and that meantime the verbal structure of the poem has been violated by the assumption that it can be mechanically explained in its totality. He wishes to achieve this reduction by bringing principles to an ever-narrowing focus within the poem until any area of uniqueness is destroyed. (p. 265)

Burke forces metaphysical issues with a rashness that is all the greater when one considers how little he himself has settled the problem of personality. A puzzling ambiguity prevails in all his books. It is difficult to perceive at what level of final definition Burke employs the word 'identity', but it is not, in any eventuality, reassuring when he turns from a discussion of this subject to quote as an authority Mr. Harold Laski on social pluralism. And in the same volume he refuses not to believe in immortality lest he should be accused of fearing Hell. (p. 266)

Whether, theoretically, the Symbolic Act of a poem, if educed and interpreted with great tact and discretion, yet always regarded as having significant existence for the literary critic only in the particular words themselves and nowhere else—whether or not such an Act would be capable of bridging the gap in Burke's criticism between the deadening work of his principles operating within the verbal structure and the full vitality of the Symbolic Drama he conceives as overriding everything is a question that is answered by no practical examples in his volumes. The Symbolic Act so conceived might become a satisfactory way of approaching the uniqueness of a poem, but it would require a different kind of sensibility than Burke's to demonstrate the fact.

I am very conscious, however, that there are many passages in Burke that seem to attribute a complexity to a poem that might appear at variance with some of the criticisms I have been making. For example, he can write:

'Every act is a miracle, a synthesis that can be reduced to an infinity of components. For if it is by shrewd words that we dispel the mystery, and since every act fuses in a spontaneous instant to a complexity of factors that could not be verbally extricated in a lifetime, it follows that every act is a miracle'.

There is no satisfactory indication here of what the nature of the 'fusing' act would be, and Burke's scattered discussions of what he calls the Symbolic Merger are ultimately elusive. It is noticeable that the word 'miracle', and the magical image of dispelling mystery by shrewd words, are further emotive bridgings between Burke's sense of the part personality plays in literature and how little a 'scientific terminology' can in the end compass its effects. The kind of complexity that Burke here predicates of a poem has the sheer quantitative advantage that characterizes Richards' conception of a poem (at work in the sensibility) as an infinity of little swinging weights, capable of being added to indefinitely as new complexities arise. But in Burke's case as a whole the issues are complicated by the intrusion of what Richards would call the 'animistic' temptation. However, if Burke were content to let matters rest at the level of the passage just quoted there would be little cause to complain. But after such a general accolade to a poem's complexity as he gives here, Burke feels free to go ahead and 'extricate' whatever he likes in the time allowed him. Since he completely lacks the fine critical distinction of Richards, the results are usually unsatisfactory and sometimes even ludicrous.

2. By saying that a poem is a constitutive act, a verbal object enduring in other temporal scenes than that in which it was first created, Burke probably means that the Act is fully contained in the words of the poem—it is difficult to be quite sure in view of his practice. But whether or not the literary quality, the verbal distinction of a poem, has anything at all to do with constituting the reality of the Act is a problem never touched on. The examination of the Symbolic Act which it will now be necessary to undertake will force the conclusion that the Act has nothing whatever to do with the literary distinction of the poem, and is useless in any attempt at practical evaluation. The most complete statement of Burke's theory of Symbolic Act is in The Philosophy of Literary Form. Burke submits it there to a long panoramic survey, but the only point there will be space to mention here is his gruesome substitution of the word 'statistical' for 'symbolic', an additional indication of his habit of thinking of vital processes in terms that submit them to a radical reduction. By 'statistical' he means something similar to Caroline Spurgeon's indexing of images. By counting image clusters and psycho-analysing them he arrives at the psychological urgencies behind the composition, and these urgencies, since the neurological structure is unchanging, may be generalized into certain symbolic acts with individual modifications, according to the neuroses of the individual. Extensive biographical material must, naturally, be drawn on. Now tactfully employed such a procedure, which is by no means original with Burke, might occasionally prove enlightening in elucidating some novel or poem. (pp. 267-68)

The essay 'Symbolic Action in an Ode by Keats' is Burke's most successful analysis of a poem, and his most famous piece. It attempts to resolve the 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' antagonism of an 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' within a highly interpretative framework, equating beauty with poetry and truth with science, and merging them together in an Act-Scene ratio in a final act of transcendence. 'Transcendence' was defined somewhere in Burke as an adoption of another point of view from which opposites cease to be opposites…. The important question is to what degree the Symbolic Act that Burke finds in the Ode is subtly suggested by gratuitous contributions of tone and cross associations. The essay contains several very good things, especially in the second half, but it is the larger critical strategy that must be considered here. Near the end of the essay Burke remarks that the Ode 'begins with an ambiguous fever'. 'Fever', even at this late stage in his essay, is a heavily weighted word to describe what is occurring in the first stanza. This 'fever', which is the ground of the Symbolic Act in the poem as Burke interprets it, has been suggested by the closing lines of the first stanza, and by finding in the second stanza a double motivational level in the 'pipes and timbrel' theme. Here, in the region of the 'mystic oxymoron' (another highly charged phrase) where melodies are unheard and pipes play ditties of no tone, Burke suggests that Keats is reaching out towards the absolute. He is 'meditating upon absolute sound, the essence of sound, which would be soundless as the prime mover is motionless….' Burke then discusses the arrested 'pre-ecstacy' of the last four lines, and carries on into the third stanza where the so-called 'fever' divides into a 'transcendental fever, which is felicitous, divinely above "all human breathing passion"', and an 'earthly fever' that 'leaves a burning forehead and parching tongue'. 'From the bodily fever, which is a passion, and malign, there has split off a spiritual activity, a wholly benign aspect of the total agitation'. An extended analysis of the last two stanzas exhibits the final confirmation of this transcendence in the Scene-Act ratio.

Now this is an elaborate interpretation and would require, to justify itself, constant reference to the text. But in actual fact Burke makes hardly more pointed references to the poem as a word structure than has been made in the above brief paraphrase. In order to see clearly how little contact there is between the poem and Burke's analysis one should, by a kind of double entry criticism, place Burke's most persuasive arguments in one column and note the points where those arguments really touch the text in an opposite column. But that would be an extended essay in itself, and the most that can be done here is to remark that between the very inconclusive paragraphs in which Burke discusses the words themselves, the Symbolic Act slips most comfortably into the poem itself by means of certain tricky passages that Burke uses in the manner of forensic shoehorns. (pp. 270-71)

The 'fever', which is the sine qua non of this Symbolic Act, was more or less assumed in the first stanza and [in the second] it begins to be incarnated in an emotional image of romantic love-death drawn out of a Marxist interpretation of the economic environment in which the poem was composed. It is worth noting that the Wagnerian music acts very persuasively in making the transition from the economic background to the particular symbology of the Act. And here, incidentally, one might stop to wonder if Burke really likes the Ode at all. He might be expected to dislike it as an expression of capitalism, for commenting on capitalist 'snobbism' in Attitudes toward History Burke remarked: 'The body was "vile" and the mind was "pure" and eventually vile body would attain the spirituality of pure mind. People now seem to hope that such a "transcendence" shall be done here on earth by machinery'. According to Burke's interpretation of the Ode the transcendence it achieves is precisely of this kind, and from one point of view Burke might even consider it, in his frame of things, as a preparatory exercise for moving on to other kinds of transcendence by machines…. [Having] deposited the central motive or 'fever' of the Symbolic Act in a deceptively concrete image of romantic love-death, Burke clinches the relation between love-death and private property (perhaps in this way Burke really means to rescue the Ode for Communism after all, making love-death transcend private property) by an appeal to the 'unimpeachable authority' of Shakespeare's 'The Phoenix and the Turtle'. Whatever else this does (a point that is vague to me), it provides him with its 'pun on sexual burning' to add to the original relationship, and so endow the final transcendence with a highly emotive passion. This 'sexual burning' naturally leads into the question of Keats' tubercular fever and his love for [his mistress] Fanny Brawne…. Burke then sums up what he has been saying in this part of his argument with another shoehorn passage:

'Speaking of agents, patients, and action here, we might pause to glance back over the centuries thus: in the Aristotelian grammar of motives, action has its reciprocal in passion, hence passion is the property of a patient. But by the Christian paradox (which made the martyr's action identical with his passion, as the accounts of the martyrs were called both Acts and Passionals), patience is the property of a moral agent. And this Christian view, as secularized in the philosophy of romanticism, with its stress upon creativeness, leads us to the possibility of a bodily suffering redeemed by a poetic act'.

Thus Burke concludes the first stage in his construction of the Ode's Symbolic Act—the establishment of a kind of 'fever' or motive composed of intellectual or spiritual action and bodily passion capable of being separated in a particular way. The above paragraph ends this part of the argument on the very note that Burke, for his purposes, had to make as explicit as possible, and yet we have arrived at it, not in terms of the first two stanzas, but in terms of certain generalizations about romantic love-death in the nineteenth century, and further generalizations about private property…. (pp. 272-73)

3. It will have become clear by this time how Symbolic Action is interpreted as ritual. Burke has frequent and extended discussions on the nature of ritualism in his books, and anyone interested in this aspect of his criticism should turn to the chapters, 'Ritual Drama as the Hub', in The Philosophy of Literary Form, and 'The General Nature of Ritual', in Attitudes toward History. The idea of literature as ritual is probably based on the ritualistic function of Greek drama…. However, I cannot throw off the suspicion that Burke's own sense of ritual is merely an extension, in terms of modern anthropology, of the old religiose-æsthetic tradition of nineteenth-century England…. In Counter-Statement he has an enthusiastic essay on Pater, and anyone who takes the trouble to reread Marius the Epicurean after finishing with Burke's volumes will be surprised at the resemblance which, if very spotty, is sometimes deep. (pp. 273-74)

But Burke, due to the advances in psychology and anthropology that have taken place since Pater's death, is able to make poetry into 'a rival religion, a rival religious service', with a completeness that might even have shocked the elder man. I do not wish to go into a detailed discussion of Burke's ritualistic literary practices here, but they are more or less summed up by his assertion: 'Our basic principle is that all symbolism can be treated as the ritualistic naming and changing of identity (whereby a man fits himself for a role in accordance with established co-ordinates or for a change of role in accordance with new co-ordinates which necessity has forced upon him)'. He proceeds to show that 'these rituals of change or "purification" centre about three kinds of imagery: purification by ice, by fire, or by decay. "Ice" tends to emphasize castration and frigidity…. Purification by fire … probably suggests "incest awe"', and so on. Great faith in this sort of thing leads Burke to such irrelevant groupings as The Waste Land with Dos Passos' The Big Money on the basis of their imagery of desiccation.

I should not, however, wish to offer a criticism here of the kinds of activity Burke sees as going on within a poem. That is a subject too large to come, properly, within the scope of any essay on Burke. The most one can do is to criticize the vocabulary with which he endeavours to compass these operations, and to note the kind of deflection implicit in it. The changes of identity, the scapegoat, etc., would all seem to be somewhat pretentious extensions of catharsis fancied up by an occult overlay. Since a good part of Burke's vocabulary is based on primitive ritual there may be some risk in using the word 'occult' here. Classical anthropology exercises powerful prerogatives in contemporary criticism, whose exponents frequently seem to think that its myths and symbols can be lugged over from their original context to the present time with all their magic intact—a state of mind that suggests not only a collapse of the historical sense but an incredible simplification of the nature of man. In introducing Pater I have already implied what I mean in saying that Burke's vocabulary deflects his fundamental meanings towards the occult, but it is a statement that requires rounding out in these closing paragraphs. In Counter-Statement he accused those critics who believe in a unique correspondence between meaning and rhythm and rhythm and imagery in a poem of being quasi-mystics; but quasi-mystical is exactly what I should be inclined to call a paragraph … which describes the artist's symbolic suicide and emergence in the poem as a new self carrying on in a new role…. (p. 275)

Under whatever other aspects than that of a literary critic (and Burke shows up better under these other aspects) he may be considered, [Burke's] chief importance in this favoured role lies in his representative quality, and in his influence. He might easily become the archetypal pattern for an unfortunate trend in American criticism, a trend that would place literature against a background of sciences rather than in a traditional social (as opposed to socialist) context, that would expunge words from literature at the very moment it seemed to be giving them detailed attention, that would consider literature as a bag of vicarious satisfactions at the very moment it called it 'equipment for living', and arranging the discoveries of literary criticism from the viewpoint of purpose (Burke calls this 'teleological criticism') would have the purpose carefully selected before the criticism was undertaken. There may be nothing wrong with Burke's ideas beyond the way he uses them. For the most part they are not new ideas, but new formulations of ideas arranged in relation to each other with astonishing internal consistency. But any critical vocabulary so highly organized, no matter how desperately it may reach out towards flexibility, has misunderstood the nature of literature and rigidified the sensibility of the critic in certain set responses. Burke has condemned traditional critical vocabularies in terms similar to these, but surely his own is at least as guilty, if in slightly different ways. (p. 277)