Kenneth Burke: ‘Formalist Criticism: Its Principles and Limits’

Abstract

In our essays on the Keats ode,¹ my ‘dramatistic’ view of form coincided with Mr Brooks’s concept of ‘dramatic analogues’ at those points where we were treating the Urn as a character of the situation in which the ‘fair Attitude’ was addressed. Thus, above all, when the Urn vatically announces that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ we agreed in viewing this as a statement properly prepared for within the conditions of the poem, and not to be read simply as a ‘scientific’ or ‘philosophic’ proposition equally valid outside its context.