'I Shall, with the Greatest of Ease and Friendliness, Scour You from the Earth': Yvor Winters on Kenneth Burke

It was Fredric Jameson who introduced Yvor Winters into the study of Burke in a serious way, precisely because he believed that Winters corrected a serious deficiency in Burke’s work. In “The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis,” Jameson articulated what he believed to be a central purpose of criticism: to tell and to analyze “the narrative of that implacable yet also emancipatory logic whereby the human community has evolved into its present form and developed the sign systems by which we live and explain our lives to ourselves.” In Jameson’s view, Burke was innovative in that he saw the centrality of symbol systems but failed insofar as he “did not want to teach us history”(523). The Burke that Jameson here refers to, primarily, is dramatism. Dramatism left, in Jameson’s view, no place for the negative hermeneutic, for the subconscious and for the ideological analysis of the subconscious.
We can argue whether Jameson’s reading of Burke is incomplete. Certainly, if Burke himself faced these deficiencies or limits in his own work, the work of three generations of Burkeans since then has corrected this lack. That said, however, Jameson himself offered a corrective to this tendency in Burke in the writings of Yvor Winters. He called Winters’“Experimental School in American Poetry” a corrective to Burke’s “Lexicon Rhetoricae” in that it historicized Burke’s conceptual scheme–it historicized those terms that Burke had located primarily in psychology.