Kenneth Burke Poems

Kenneth Burke
Kenneth Duva Burke (May 5, 1897 – November 19, 1993) was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's primary interests were in rhetoric and aesthetics. He was born on May 5 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA and graduated from Peabody High School, where his friend Malcolm Cowley was also a student. Burke attended Ohio State University for only a semester, then studied at Columbia University in 1916-1917 before dropping out to be a writer, despite hints that he would be asked to join the school's faculty.[citation needed] In Greenwich Village he kept company with avant-garde writers such as Hart Crane, Cowley, Gorham Munson, and later Allen Tate. In later life his New Jersey farm was a popular summer retreat for his extended family, as reported by his grandson Harry Chapin. [edit] Influences Burke, like many twentieth century theorists and critics, was heavily influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche. He was a lifelong interpreter of Shakespeare, and was also significantly influenced by Thorstein Veblen. Burke corresponded with a number of literary critics, thinkers, and writers over the years, including William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Ralph Ellison, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Toomer, Hart Crane,and Marianne Moore. Later thinkers who have acknowledged Burke's influence include Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, Susan Sontag (his student at the University of Chicago), Geoffrey Hartman, Edward Said, Rene Girard, Frederic Jameson, and Clifford Geertz.


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Poems

Poems Collection - poems, 2021 edition