Kenneth Burke: Form and Desire in Modern Poetry

Kenneth Burke argues for the importance of desire in the functioning of literature. More specifically, he sees a text as a structure that works with or against the reader's emotions:

"form is the creation of an appetite in the mind of the auditor, and the adequate satisfying of that appetite. This satisfaction--so complicated is the human mechanism--at times involves a temporary set of frustrations, but in the end these frustrations prove to be simply a more involved kind of satisfaction, and furthermore serve to make the satisfaction of fulfilment more intense" ("Psychology and Form" 31).

Most of Burke's examples of the writer's ability to build, frustrate, and eventually satisfy desire are narrative in nature. So, for example, he refers to Hamlet's triumph over Guildenstern, which is especially satisfying because it develops through the metaphor of the pipe that Hamlet offers to Guildenstern to play as he had attempted to "play" Hamlet.

Though Burke mostly makes use of narrative form in his examples, he also suggests that resolutions of the desire elicited by the text can come from its change in "quality": "the presence of one quality calls forth the demand for another, rather than one tangible incident of plot awaking an interest in some other possible tangible incident of plot" (38-39).  The interplay of desire and restriction, in other words, does not need to come about as a result of narrative or dramatic form, but can arise from changes in tone or attitude. His example is particularly useful for the critic of poetic modernism; he uses the pub scene in The Waste Land, which ends with the sudden quote from Shakespeare. The agonies of low culture, as Burke sees it, is suddenly rescued or resolved by the allusion to high culture.

Whether or not one agrees with Burke's reading of this particular scene, it is important to recognize that Burke is advancing (or transforming) the typical "New Critical" interest in tension or irony. Rather than being a critic who simply recognizes formal properties such as mixing high and low, Burke contends that form operates by human emotions -- specifically desire.  The text is not isolated or inert; it is structured to elicit and satisfy human desire.

A more prosaic example, but one that helps illustrate his perspective, is his footnote on the slow motion film of a man vaulting. Though Burke points out that the still images of each moment of the man's jump provide scientific facts, he nevertheless rejects it: "so far as the aesthetic truth is concerned, this on the screen was not an athlete, but a squirming thing, a horror, displaying every fact of vaulting except the exhilaration of the act itself" (42). Aesthetic language, for Burke, invokes or unleashes emotion.  It is meant to elicit exhilaration.

In "The Poetic Process," Burke follows his insights about the emotive dynamism of literature with an interesting inversion of psychoanalysis. He is quite familiar with Freud, of course, but he builds his own explanation for the dynamism of desire -- one that naturalizes formal desire as a common product of the human mind. He posits the priority of the mind's abilities in Platonic terms: "art has always appealed [. . .] to certain potentialities of appreciation which would seem to be inherent in the very germ-plasm of man, and which, since they are constant, we might call innate forms of the mind" (46). The mind is drawn to crescendo or contrast, for instance, because...it is drawn to crescendo or contrast. The ur-form of the human brain works that way.

Burke's thought is not quite tautological, but it refuses to investigate beyond the fundamental principle that the mind is ready to work in these ways. We simply have a "germ-plasm" for these sorts of things. The abstract, content-less abilities of the mind (such as crescendo or contrast) are manifested or "individuated" when they attach to materials of individual experience.

But, for Burke, the abstractness of the mind, the content-less potential for forms such as crescendo, precede any of its externalizations or individuations. In fact, the urge for forms makes possible the details which subsequently attach to it. This idea is crucial for Burke because it defines the artist's task. Rather than present facts or details in literary texts, the artist must activate the formal processes of the mind, for no set of details will move everyone in the same way. Burke's example shows the emphasis on form in the artistic process: "If the artist were to externalize his mood or horror by imagining the facts of a murder, he would still have to externalize his sense of crescendo by the arrangement of these facts" (51). The accurate details of a murder, for instance, are not enough to activate horror; the formal process of crescendo makes horror possible.

Up to this point, I have merely been summarizing Burke's important contribution to our understanding of how literature works -- an understanding that, I believe, is not shared by enough critics because they often fail to recognize the relationship between formal properties and desire. However, from my perspective, Burke too firmly eternalizes the mental forms he discusses. That is, crescendo is a form, a sort of Platonic ideal beyond the reach of change, but literary history has shown that there are very dramatic breaks in technique. It seems to me that crescendo itself changes over time. 

My example must be very brief, but if one compares a poet like Whitman to T. S. Eliot, one sees that the form of crescendo itself changes. Whitman repeats a crescendo of physical attraction and sensual interaction with the world, while Eliot develops a crescendo of frustration and rejection. It might be more accurate to say that Whitman's crescendo is a release while Eliot's is an intensification because not-released.  The problem might be resolved by calling what Eliot does something else, say "reversal," but this latter term does not capture the intensity that accompanies a crescendo. Eliot's The Waste Land most certainly is a crescendo, but Burke's terms are not fungible enough to respond to obvious changes in poetic effects.  Tracking these changes in form, rather than eternal forms, is the task of the literary historian. Though we can be helped by Burke's concepts, they must be fluid enough to accept the formal varieties that poets continue to find.

The Priority of Solid Objects in Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens presents an interesting problem for critics.  On the one hand, he emphasizes the power of the human imagination, but he undercuts that power with subtle but remarkably persistent regularity.  A poem like "Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination," for example, seems to suggest the primacy of the imagination in the title. That is, reality is subject to the actions of the imagination. But the poem itself develops a contrary argument.

Stevens starts the poem with contextual particulars, naming specific time and place:

Last Friday, in the big light of last Friday night,
We drove home from Cornwall to Hartford, late.

With this beginning, the poem grants some concrete particulars to the reader. Reality seems quite normal and incontrovertible. The second couplet reinforces the logic of this argument by contrasting the real scene with an artistic abstraction of it:

It was not a night blown at a glassworks in Vienna
Or Venice, motionless, gathering time and dust.

Stevens suggests that the scene is real and unfolding (not gathering time and dust), and it cannot be reduced to an aesthetic representation, such as a miniaturized snowglobe.  In the third couplet, he extends his description of the hustle and bustle of reality as opposed to a quite abstraction:

There was a crush of strength in a grinding going round,
Under the front of the westward evening star.

Reality is powerful in its unfolding; it can crush; it has strength; it grinds; it moves round in perpetual (and unstoppable) motion.  But we also see Stevens starting to transform his argument. The car moves through Connecticut in a compellingly real way, but it does so "under the front of the westward evening star." Here, it is as if the car is guided by the star, like ancient mariners who used the stars to navigate the globe and find their way. The star takes on symbolic rather than literal value. In the next couplet, Stevens extends the symbolic (or "extra-ordinary," one might say) use of the star:

The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,
As things emerged and moved and were dissolved.

The guiding star is not just an object in the sky; instead, it engages the vigor of those driving through the night. Stevens is no longer just describing a drive through the night; the act of driving and noticing one's surroundings is a path to glory.  From this perspective, moving through the world is not the recognition of solid objects but the realization that objects emerge and then dissolve.  One can picture the car's headlights illuminating an object and then passing it, leaving it in darkness.  The metaphor suggests that life involves objects that come into being only while they are perceivable, and then they recede into some sort of non-being, which Stevens refers to as "denying itself away":

An agentine abstraction approaching form
And suddenly denying itself away.

The poem has completely reversed itself.  The stable, mundane, and utterly real Friday night between Cornwall and Hartford has turned into an ephemeral abstraction that denies itself away.  Up to this point, I would consider this a fairly traditional reading of the poem, one that digs through the logical argument (almost syllogistic, especially in Stevens' later poetry) in order to find how the imagination prevails over reality.  But here's the weird part: Stevens reasserts the primacy of the object as he destabilizes it in the final couplet:

There was an insolid billowing of the solid.
Night's moonlight lake was neither water nor air.

Rather than asserting the "insolidity" of all things in the face of the mighty imagination, Stevens only argues that we can only operate with insolidity in response to solid things. The solid object is seen, driving through the night, as an insolid billowing, but it begins and ends as a solid object.  Likewise, the moonlight lake is neither water nor air for the poetic speaker, but for Stevens the poet, it must begin as a moonlight lake.  It is object first and last.  Though we cannot perceive them as such, or we perceive them as billowing, they are always real.  This perspective separates us from objects, leaving an unbridgeable gap, but it does not deconstruct the object itself.  This means that people do not wield a powerful imagination in creating the world; they are stuck with a wobbly, shifting imagination that can only approximate actual objects.  This changes our whole perspective on imagination: it is not the power to construct; it is only a power that suffices.