(^50) Kenneth Burke
considered the minister as the representative of Christ and his garments as typical of some
aspects of Christ’s person or office—e.g.the stole is his obedience and servitude for our
sakes; (3) the allegorical school,which treats the priest as a warrior or champion, who puts
on the amice as a helmet, the alb as a breastplate, and so on.” A work constructed about
the systematic use of any such theories of correspondence would, to our way of thinking,
be allegorical. The symbolic would use an objective vocabulary for its suggestion of the
subjective, with the subjective motive being organizationally more important than the
objective one. The specific literary movement called Symbolism would exemplify this
stress to a large extent, but would also gravitate towards Surrealism, which stresses the
incongruous and contradictory nature of motives by the use of gargoyles as motifs.
Imagism would be “personalistic,” in the idealistic sense, in using scenic material as the
reflection, or extension of human characters. The “objectivist,” though rooted in symbolic
and imagist concerns, would move into a plane where the object, originally selected by
reason of its subjective reference, is studied in its own right. (The result will be
“descriptive” poetry. And it will be “scientific” in the sense that, whereas poetry is a kind
of act, the descriptiveness of science is rather the preparationfor an act, the delayed action
of a Hamletic reconnaissance in search of the accurate knowledge necessary for the, act.
And descriptive poetry falls across the two categories in that it acts by describing the scene
preparatory to an act.) Naturalism has a greater stress upon the scenic from the polemic
or depreciatory point of view (its quasi-scientific quality as delayed action, or preparation
for action, often being revealed in that such literature generally either calls for action in
the non-esthetic field or makes one very conscious of the fact that a “solution” is needed
but is not being offered). True realism is difficult for us to conceive of, after so long a
stretch of monetary idealism (accentuated as surrealism) and its counterpart, technological
materialism (accentuated as behaviorism and operationalism), while pragmatic
philosophies stress makingand doingand gettingin a localized way that obscures the
realistic stress upon the act.The German term, Realpolitik,for instance, exemplifies a crude
brand of pragmatism that completely misrepresents the realistic motive. The
communicative nature of art gives all art a realistic ingredient, but the esthetic
philosophies which the modern artist consciously or unconsciously absorbs continually
serve to obscure this ingredient rather than to cultivate it.
- This is cited from the poem that follows the one on “Marriage,” and is in turn followed
by “Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns.” The three could be taken together as a triptych that
superbly illustrates three stages in the development of one idea. First, we have the subtly averse
poem on marriage (done in a spirit of high comedy that portrays marital quarrelings as
interrelated somewhat like the steps of a minuet). Then comes the precise yet exalted
contemplation of the glacier. And finally a discussion of the unicorn, a legendary solitaire:
Thus this strange animal with its miraculous elusiveness,
has come to be unique,
‘impossible to take alive’,
tamed only by a lady inoffensive like itself—
as curiously wild and gentle.And typically, she cites of it that, since lions and unicorns are arch enemies, and “where
the one is the other cannot be missing,” Sir John Hawkins deduced an abundance of lions
in Florida from the presence of unicorns there.