Jerald L. Ross, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Abstract of a Paper to Be Presented at the 1999 Triennial Conference of the Kenneth Burke Society
In the opening sentences of a 1939 review of two Coleridge biographies (Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Biographical S by E. K. Chambers and The Life of S. T. Coleridge: The Early Years by Lawrence Hanson), Kenneth Burke reveals his poetic allegiances in no uncertain terms: "Each time I note the signs of the elite boom for Kierkegaard and Kafka, I am disgruntled. It should be Coleridge. Most assuredly, it should be Coleridge." To Burke, the work of "those lesser figures" lacks the complexity and scope of Coleridge. While Kafka and Kierkegaard "do well by the stage of masturbatory adolescence--and so their scrupulous quarrels with the father may be interesting and relevant to watch," their "Hamletic labyrinth" is "trivial" in comparison with the mature thought of Coleridge. Burke concludes that "They had many fewer cylinders to hit on--they were like a first engine, Coleridge like the engine after long development" ("Why Coleridge?" 103).
That Burke admired Coleridge so enthusiastically should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Burke's work. He read Coleridge intently, and returned to him continually throughout his long career. As Timothy Crusius has noted, Burke's personal copies of Coleridge's work are "so marked up, so full of marginalia, that the text itself almost disappears" (4). Again and again in the massive body of written and spoken work which he produced, Burke mentions Coleridge to illustrate a point, to extend an idea, or to spin off his own take on a critical concept. (Peter Settle's Index to the Major Works of Kenneth Burke contains 64 entries under the heading of S.T. Coleridge, and his index refers only to Burke's book-length studies.) In addition to reviews of Coleridge biographies and criticism, Burke wrote two major essays focused on Coleridge's poems: the opening monograph of The Philosophy of Literary Form and an essay in Language As Symbolic Action entitled " 'Kubla Khan,' Proto-Surrealist Poem."
In both of these works, Burke articulates his theory of symbolic action and demonstrates how his method of "indexing" can yield insights into Coleridge's poetic motives. Beginning with these two pieces, I propose that Burke's theory and method can likewise illumine the motives that inform his own critical project. As Burke has often suggested, the place to begin is his novel, Towards a Better Life. For example, in a 1972 letter to Malcolm Cowley, Burke suggests that "My TBL is to my critical books as Nietzsche's Zarathustra is to his others. (That is, it's the ritualized essence out of which comes the existence of my detailed analysis" (Jay 385). My presentation will discuss how "the ritualized essence" of TBL was distilled by Burke during a period of great personal and social crisis, and it will suggest that this powerful liquor became the fuel that drove his "engine after long development." It will show how personal, social, critical, and poetic motives become intertwined in the symbolic act, whether that act be literary, critical, or something that lies somewhere in between.
Return to the 1999 KB Conference Program
 |
|