REMEMBERING BURKE

REMEMBERING BURKE

Abstract

171 REMEMBERING BURKE Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare. Edited By SCOTT L. NEWSTOK. Parlor Press, 2007; $65, $32 (paper). Poetry, said Keats, should appear almost as a remembrance. It has anticipated us at our moment of apprehension. Our experience of it, as in Plato’s theory, is more ‘like remembering something already known but forgotten, than like the accumulating of novelties’. So Kenneth Burke, in this new miscellany, writes about Shakespeare’s ‘anticipatory mentality’ when it came to language: ‘Have you not’, Burke asks, ‘every once in a while run across some writer who delights you (and maybe somewhat vexes you) by having already said things that you somehow felt on the verge of saying yourself?’ Shakespeare anticipates us, as I found Burke himself has done throughout this volume that compiles the work of sixty years: in all things Shakespearian – notes, lectures and essays – by one of the twentieth century’s more eccentric thinkers and literary critics and (as time has had it) subterranean influences. Reading Burke, now, is like being the character in one of Robert Pinsky’s latest poems who, suffering from both amnesia and deja vu, says ‘I feel like ´ ` I have forgotten this before’. ‘One