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Introduction

Nathaniel A. Rivers and Ryan P. Weber

Kenneth Burke’s critical approach resists containment. Reading through this collection, this elusiveness seems intentional. Perhaps a metaphor, or several, would be helpful. In his essay “Literature as Equipment for Living,” Burke characteristically piles metaphor on top of metaphor, each helpful in describing attributes of literature while suggesting incongruent directions. Literature is medicine. Literature is strategy. Literature is attitude. Literature is vehicle. Literature is sociology. But these metaphors are not as incongruent as they seem; they are active categories. Burke writes: “Art forms like ‘tragedy’ or ‘comedy’ or ‘satire’ would be treated as equipments for living, that size up situations in various ways” (Philosophy of Literary Form 304). For Burke, literature is not to be passively absorbed, but actively applied. Books are strategies, written with specific attitudes, drawn from specific situations to address recurrent situations. Burke opens The Philosophy of Literary Form, a book about criticism that collects some of his criticism, with this very idea. “Critical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situations in which they arose. They are not merely answers, they are strategic answers, stylized answers” (1).1

One of the many nuances of the “equipment for living” metaphor is that it applies as equally to the creation of literature as to its criticism. We seek strategies for life in literature, whether we are writing it or reading it. Burke says this about the strategizing of the author: “One seeks to ‘direct the larger movements and operations’ in one’s campaign of living. One ‘maneuvers,’ and the maneuvering is an ‘art’” (298). Readers, using these maneuverings, can discern different strategies in different books, so they would be wise to have available as many approaches as possible. Each book, in this way, is medicine, “designed for consolation or vengeance, for admonition or exhortation, for foretelling” (293). Reading Coleridge, reading Eliot, reading Woolf, reveals different cures for what ails us. In these cures, Burke finds “strategies for selecting enemies and allies, for socializing losses, for warding off the evil eye, for purification, propitiation, and desanctification, consolation and vengeance, admonition and exhortation, implicit commands or instructions of one sort or another” (304).

How do you easily define a critic who deploys so many metaphors for what literature is and does? How do you sum up a critic who writes in his critical treatise Counter-Statement, “We advocate nothing, then, but a return to inconclusiveness” (91)? Simply put, you can’t. Despite being variously categorized as a New Critic, a Marxist critic, a psychoanalytic critic, Burke works beyond these tidy labels. And he means to. “The greater the range and depth of considerations about which a critic can be explicit,” Burke writes in “Kinds of Criticism,” “the more he is fulfilling his task as a critic” (272). His critical program is so extensive that its surface can barely be scratched here. As Paul Jay writes, “The scope and complexity of Burke’s work as a literary critic makes generalizations difficult” (Jay, “Kenneth Burke”). Many critics finally solved this problem by simply referring to Burke’s system as “Burkeology.”

Within Burkeology, it is difficult to see Burke as a literary critic when he is more famous for his social and cultural criticism at large. Books such as Permanence and Change, Attitudes Toward History, A Grammar of Motives, and A Rhetoric of Motives use literature primarily to explore the drama of human interaction played out in language. This exploration, however, evidences the crossing of traditional genres present throughout Burke. William H. Rueckert testifies to this approach in charting the labeling of Burke’s work:

At first we thought of him as a literary critic (a role that is continuous throughout his career); then we thought of him as a social/cultural critic (another role that is continuous); then we thought of him as a language critic (not a linguist, but a critic who approached the study of human relations through the study of language). (100)

Rueckert here captures the dynamic relationship between the social, the cultural, the linguistic, and the literary as Burke envisioned them. Dennis J. Ciesielski argues that Burke’s criticism “reveals and investigates the social textuality” in a way that juxtaposes the “cultural, historical, and linguistic” forces at work in everyday life. It is the “multiplicity of these discourse situations which validates Burke’s investigative forays” into what Ciesielski calls “world-text” (243). If literature is equipment for living, then literary criticism is always already social, cultural, and linguistic criticism. As Rueckert parenthetically argues above, these roles are continuous; we would argue that, more importantly, they are all coterminous.

As Rueckert’s statement implies, Burke began his career as a literary critic, publishing reviews in the “little magazines” and scholarly publications of the 1920s and 1930s. But with these literary reviews, Burke began to chart his career as a social and cultural critic as well. Many of these reviews were short, only a page or a column in the review section, but they were remarkable grapplings with the diverse fields of the day, including: literature, poetry, criticism, sociology, philosophy and language. As Burke tackles a work, he masterfully engages its ideas in ways that elaborate dynamic dimensions of the other’s thoughts and his own. His reviews contributed to the valuable discourse in magazines such as The New Masses, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, and especially The Dial. Many of these magazines had a huge impact on the artistic and critical circles of their day, drawing in literary giants like William Carlos Williams, W.B. Yeats, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Carl Sandburg, and e.e. cummings.

Though most of Burke’s book reviews are not as available as his widely printed works, thinkers across the humanities have lauded Burke’s abilities as a reader and critic. W. H. Auden praised Burke’s magnitude in 1941: “No isolated quotation can do justice to Mr. Burke’s subtlety and good sense, and no doubts that one may entertain about the soundness of his critical position can obscure the fact that he is unquestionably the most brilliant and suggestive critic now writing in America” (59). Rueckert, who calls Burke the “omnivorous critic at large” (46), echoes Auden by asserting that “Burke is unquestionably one of our great modern critics” (100). Recent critics also cite Burke as an influence; most famously, Harold Bloom called Burke “the strongest living representative of the American critical tradition, and perhaps the largest single source of that tradition since its founder, Ralph Waldo Emerson” (qtd. in Kostelanetz 11)

These critics praise Burke for analyzing the symbolic action of language within literature to reveal how it is not just a reflection but an interpretation of reality. As Burke writes in the review “The Quest for Certainty,” (1930), “a shift in the vocabulary of approach will entail new classifications for the same events." Burke calls these shifts terministic screens, because, like color filters on a camera, vocabularies work as a selection and deflection of reality and are thus an active interpretation that prescribes further action. Literature then becomes the naming of recurrent situations as a means of coping with them. The critic’s job is to identify the use and usefulness of these namings, to interpret the interpretation. This leads to Jay’s conclusion that literature and literary criticism are both equipment for living. Jay writes, “I think it is important to recognize, too, that criticism—and the criticism of criticism—is also treated by Burke as a broadly social act by which we equip and re-equip ourselves to live” (“Criticism” 29). If this critical program is performed well, it can transform literature into salvation. Rhetorician Wayne Booth writes, “[Burke] would use criticism to save the world, including the world of criticism, and he would also see literature itself as one mode that can save or damn us” (9). By posting warning signs and helpful instructions, critics help readers maximize the strategic value of a text. As Rueckert writes, critical texts are themselves equipment for living:

Criticism also functions as part of our equipment for living—it’s something that it most certainly did for Burke during his long and varied critical life. Critics are mediators between the symbolic structures and us readers; they share their knowledge with us, not because they think we are stupid, but because they see things in these texts that we don’t and they are convinced that their knowledge will be useful to us. (114)

If critics look for things that the rest of us don’t see, they better look in all the places we never imagined. Burke’s reviews, as well as his wildly annotated personal library, evidence an uncanny reading ability, reflecting his view in the essay “Kinds of Criticism” that “At [criticism’s] best, it sustains the intense contemplation of an object to the point where one begins to see not only more deeply into the subject but beyond it” (276). Richard Kostelanetz describes Burke’s copy of Harold Bloom’s Wallace Stevens, which demonstrates Burke’s vigilant notetaking and marginalia in anticipation of a review in The New Republic in 1977 (“Untitled Review of Harold Bloom”):

On every page are perhaps 20 inked annotations. Key words are underlined, vertical lines trace connections. In the blank pages of the back of the book and even on the flyleaves are more extensive notes, some of them referring to the book in general and others to particular passages. This is the kind of critical artifact that should be on permanent display in every university library. (25)

Because of his complexity as a reader, Burke’s criticism transcends any specific school or structure. Limiting reading to formalized critical conventions risks deflecting alternate avenues of salvation and tumbling headlong into damnation. To this end, Burke is, as Charles Glicksberg writes, “A subtle and adventurous critic . . . willing to follow the trail of an idea wherever it may lead, without regard to the established sanctities of meaning” (74).

This tendency for intense contemplation, while beneficial and productive, can frustrate even the most generous of readers. Burke’s dogged, even playful, explorations of specific textual elements may appear tangential. Wendell Harris comments:

Burke creates difficulties for his readers. Much of what seems unnecessarily eccentric in his writing results from a tendency to elaborate as far as possible a limited number of ideas that strongly appeal to him . . . until they swallow everything in sight. Moreover Burke frequently seems to be writing only to himself. (453)

A first glance through these reviews could produce sympathy for Harris’s critique; Burke may seem at times to write largely for his own amusement. Indeed, he almost apologizes in the review “Engineering With Words” (1923) for pursuing Gertrude Stein’s Geography and Plays by means of a circuitous discussion of Milton.

Ultimately, though, the charge of digression is too extreme even for a man who adheres to no strict critical approach. These supposed digressions are better understood as Burke’s desire to incorporate everything available to the critic, things both intrinsic and extrinsic to the text. Burke writes, “The main ideal of criticism, as I conceive it, is to use all that is there to use” (Philosophy 23). The biography of the writer, the social situations surrounding the work, the terms used by the writer and reader, politics, history, economics, ecology, physiology, and psychoanalysis—all provide fruitful insight into a text.2 This broad scope caused Andrew King to look back with pleasure on the rise of Burkean criticism, with its adherents across disciplines like English, communications, sociology, philosophy, and even economics and political science. King writes, “While Burkean critics concentrated on a single finite text, they placed it in a rich historical and political context” (Enos et al. 367). Recent scholarship continues this tradition by using Burke’s “equipment for living” concept as a fruitful metaphor in investigating a wide variety of texts: the poetry of William Carlos Williams (Clark), the aesthetics and social impact of jazz and punk music (Veneciano; Matula), the ethics of Renaissance literature (Grossman), the rhetoric of religious discourse (Smith; Lewis), the work of Ralph Ellison (Pease), and parodic texts like Spaceballs and Mad Magazine (Ott and Bonnstetter; Carabas).

The ability of the equipment for living metaphor to reveal resonance within so many disciplines and texts reveals Burke’s inclusive approach, which employs several critical methods to search a text for strategies. Because of his desire to treat literature as equipment for living, Burke always looks for the best parts of even the worst books. He calls this strategy discounting. Discounting is a generosity in reading that selects the criteria most likely to produce usable insights from a text, guided by the understanding that no text can do or say everything at once. Burke writes, “By proper discounting everything becomes usable” (Attitudes 244). If literature is equipment for living, then no one book, no one piece of equipment, is going to be useful in every situation.

Though Burke demands usefulness in literature, this does not imply that he favors the practical over the aesthetic. In fact, Counter-Statement erodes that binary. Literature is useful because it is beautiful. Burke argues that the opposition between practical and aesthetic “vanishes when a machine is beautiful. Accordingly, to ask that the aesthetic set itself in opposition to the practical is to ask that the aesthetic be one specific brand of the aesthetic” (111). Literature functions as equipment, but the metaphor enhances, not maligns, the role of eloquence in art. Authors who wish to be simply and blatantly didactic are better off using “the pamphlet, the political tract, the soap-box oration” (189) as the equipment to spread their message. Literature must arouse and satisfy the desires of readers with a form that parallels experiences outside of art. It must craft evocative, moving symbols that provide “a terminology of thoughts, actions, emotions, attitudes, for codifying a pattern of experience” (154). These symbols encapsulate with great power and resonance the complexities of society, providing readers with new perspectives and strategies for their situations. For further discussion of aesthetics and usefulness as components of equipment for living see Appendix A.

Given how Burke unites usefulness with aesthetics, it is not surprising that his reviews often highlight the power of symbol, literary form, beauty, and eloquence to generate attitudes in readers. Discussing this in the review “A New Poetics” (1925), Burke writes that “art, by its subtle insinuations of what aspects of life are to be desired and what to be avoided, contributes moral standards in that manner which seems most penetrative: by unaware absorption.” A critic’s work involves uncovering the prescribed action inherent in literary symbols. As Burke argues in the review “Symbolic War” (1936), the attitudes offered by poets function as incipient action:

. . . the nonpartisan, imaginative poet writes, “Beware, a storm approacheth.” As propagandist he adds, “Go thou, and buy rubbers.” The critics of the “proletarian” school . . . have done us a service in recalling how often the poet, in this imperfect world, is in effect writing, “Go thou, and buy rubbers” when he is only aware of writing,3 “A storm approacheth.” In the mere act of warning us what to beware of, he suggests the kind of measures to be taken.

This search for “measures to be taken” is the driving force behind the reviews in this collection. Satisfaction in reviewing never came to Burke through the writing of a plot summary and the awarding of stars. He is far more interested in charting the aesthetics of a work and navigating through its most fruitful branches, whether literary or critical. To this end, he may even violate the more standard conventions of reviewing, giving unannounced spoilers or ignoring a plot entirely as it suits his purposes.

Indulgent, perhaps, but Burke was always ultimately interested in the way a book could reflect, inform, reshape, or contain situations. A perusal of this volume reveals instance after instance when Burke evaluates literature in terms of its strategy and style. In the review “Fraught with Freight,” Burke argues that Thomas Mann’s writing provides symbolic strategies for the situations outside of art. “At times his work suggests to me, not a personality, but a battlefield, an expanse of suffering soil across which the fluctuant and indeterminate conflicts of our day are waged momentously.” When reviewing One Season Shattered in the review “Deft Plaintiveness” (1936), Burke notices in James Daly a childlike quality that, while appealing, is ultimately insufficient. “I am a little afraid of it, since it does not equip us explicitly for battle.” Given art’s relevance to life, then, it seems natural that Burke favorably evaluates Joseph Krutch’s Experience and Art (1932):

Mr. Krutch, rightly, I think, questions those schools of literary criticism which would relegate the enjoyment of poetry to a mere “make-believe” corner of the mind. He holds that art bears upon the coordinates of living in general, giving us those emphases in the imaginative sphere which are relevant to “other human interests,” to man’s “other activities” outside of art.

It is from this basis that he reviews Horace Gregory’s Chorus for Survival, emphasizing in “The Hope in Tragedy” (1935) the ability of tragic stories to transform human sorrow into strength: “Within the frame of the tragic attitude, we do not seek to sterilize our aberrations, but to harness them, to make them serve, and with the help of criticism to build assets out of liabilities.” A failure to symbolically encapsulate experience is also seen as a major failing of Glenway Wescott’s Apple of the Eye, as Burke reviews it in “Delight and Tears” (1924). It is not enough that readers can enjoy the book as if it “actually occurred in one’s own life,” because the work does not invent “symbols which adequately summarize for us the emotional and ideological complexities in which we are involved.” This distinction is an important corrective to those who would reduce the “stylized answers” approach to what Burke calls in the essay “Equipment for Living” “easy consolation” (298), evidenced in books that provide readers clichéd relatability or an unearned sense of success without offering sustainable symbols for future experience.

Often, Burke’s quest for applicability is so irresistible that he will highlight through discounting aspects of the same work which are and are not useful to reader’s situations. When writing “William James: Superlative Master of the Comparative” (1936), Burke praises James for the pragmatic application of his thought process: “It promoted a kind of any-port-in-a-storm attitude, annoying perhaps to lovers of the symmetrical when it takes the metaphysical guise of pluralism, but extremely helpful for the moral jugglings we must manage in this imperfect world.” At the same time, he wonders if James alone is all the equipment modern readers need: “Yet, as we finish the account of his work, we are led to wonder whether, for all his inclusiveness, he could give us a full equipment for today. One is struck, for instance, by an almost total absence of historical and economic considerations. The mention of politics is rare, and naïve.” Similar critical tactics enacted in “Coleridge Rephrased” (1935) analyze I. A. Richards, whom Burke lauds for investigating the current relevance of Coleridge’s work:

Expertly translating passages from Coleridge into terms that more easily reveal their relevance to the present, [Richards] enables us to glimpse the ways in which a poet’s myths may be of the utmost importance to mankind in the most pragmatic sense conceivable: by providing the framework through which our minds may be organized and ordered.

Simultaneously, Burke wonders if the usability of Richard’s own work is tarnished because it ignores the role of economics and propaganda (a term, incidentally, which is not wholly pejorative for Burke): “Such thoughts would suggest the possibility that, to be completely serviceable for our needs, [Richards’s] book should not so cursorily dismiss the ‘propagandist’ element in poetry today.”

Even when not completely allied with the author, Burke gleans something from his reading. In “Corrosive Without Corrective” (1938), he finds value in Thurman Arnold’s The Folklore of Capitalism: “The book is certainly not to be considered an alternative to Marxism, as many reviewers have proposed; but if read by readers who discount it from the angle of a Marxist critique, it is very serviceable indeed.” Burke employs a similar strategy in “Words as Deeds” (1975), discounting behaviorist scientists by prioritizing the terminology he believes they neglect:

But by a dramatistic reinterpretation, much of their work can be of great use, in helping to suggest the proper admonitions when we are attempting to sum up just what is involved in our being the kind of symbol-using, speech-acting animal we are, as viewed in terms of MOTION, ACTION, and ATTITUDE.

In the end, Burke is always interested in ways that literature allows readers to better understand the complex situations of their own lives. Occasionally, this act involves including details from his own, as he does in “Imaginary Lines” (1962) when he relates Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle with his own experience “of truly apocalyptic terror” at the planetarium or when he compares reading James Daly’s One Season Shattered (1936) to seeing the framed aphorism “Laugh and the world laughs with you—weep and you weep alone” on a wall from his childhood. At one point, Burke admits to imbibing as a way of approaching more appropriately the poetry of Hart Crane. Experience can clarify art, and art can clarify experience, as it does in Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers. Burke writes in the review “Permanence and Change” (1934) about readers recognizing recurrent situations in art:

They were the “key” situations of the tribe that had evolved them, after all that could be forgotten had been forgotten and all that could not be forgotten had been made salient. They were not “facts,” as legalistic precedents are, but communal works of art. And when the individual understood his own role by reference to them (saying, “I am like Jacob,” or “This situation is like Leah’s”) he was being himself and a member of his group simultaneously.

Some readers will notice that this review shares its title with one of Burke’s earlier books, but the similarities do not end there. Many of these reviews are quite revelatory of Burke’s later writings, referencing and anticipating them both directly and indirectly. Before it appears in Permanence and Change, Burke’s wily old trout, the famed example of overcoming trained incapacity, makes a cameo in the review “Poets All” (1933). Elsewhere, Burke gives a unique definition of perspective by incongruity in his review “Corrosive Without Corrective” (1938). Other characteristic Burkean concerns are more subtle but just as pervasive. His obsession with form is everywhere, but those interested in finding specific manifestations might do well to examine “Engineering with Words” (1923) and “Delight and Tears” (1924). Burke is also quite fond of revealing the influence of terministic screens wherever he can, and he makes fascinating explorations into their operation in “Heaven’s First Law” (1922) and “Intelligence as a Good” (1930). If parts of Burke are everywhere in these reviews, some reviews find much of Burke encapsulated, with “Words as Deeds” and "Kermode Revisited" perhaps, being the most thorough discussions of his larger works. Burkeology abounds in this collection, and Burke’s fingerprints are all over these reviews. Even titles reflect his concern with terminology, situation, and applicability: “The Criticism of Criticism” (1955), “On Covery, Re- and Dis-” (1953), “Renaming Old Directions” (1935), “Cautious Enlightenment” (1936), “The Editing of Oneself” (1921), “A Gist of Gists of Gists” (1937).

These concerns create a complexity and nuance which make Burke hard to pin down. Burke chases many leads in these reviews, but the constant approach is active reading that values literature as equipment for living. Burke writes, “You will note, I think, that there is no ‘pure’ literature here. Everything is ‘medicine’” (Philosophy 293). Literature can act not only as medicine, but as strategy, as attitude, as vehicle, as sociology. If Burke conceives of literature as medicine, then think of these reviews as prescriptions. If he conceives of literature as strategy, then think of this book as the war room. If Burke conceives of literature as equipment for living, then consider this book the blueprint.

Notes

1. Burke quotes this passage in his review of J.L. Austin, "Words as Deeds."

2. Though Burke clearly breaks from the mold of any specific literary critical tradition, it is likewise inaccurate to classify him under every critical approach. No one critic can cover all ground or use all terms, as Burke himself would acknowledge, especially since many current critical vocabularies were unavailable. However, many scholars have found Burke’s critical vocabulary compatible with current terminology. See, for instance, Phyllis M. Japp’s “‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’: Reclaiming Burke for Feminist Scholarship” or Dustin Bradley Goltz’s “Perspective by Incongruity: Kenneth Burke and Queer Theory.”

3. This does not imply that Burke believes writers are always unaware of the broader implications of their symbols, though Burke would argue that certain critical vocabularies are better suited to drawing out these implications, what Burke would call their use.

Works Cited

Auden, W. H. “A Grammar of Assent.” The New Republic 105 (14 July 1941): 59. Print.

Booth, Wayne C. “Kenneth Burke’s Way of Knowing.” Critical Inquiry 1 (Fall 1974): 1–22. Print.

Goltz, Dustin Bradley. “Perspective by Incongruity: Kenneth Burke and Queer Theory.” Genders 45. June 2007. Web. 30 Oct. 2009.

Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes Toward History. 1937. 3rd rev. ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Print.

—. Counter-Statement. 1931. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968. Print.

—. “Kinds of Criticism.” Poetry 68 (Aug. 1946): 272–82. Print.

—. The Philosophy of Literary Form. 1941. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973. Print.

Carabas, Teodora. “Tales Calculated to Drive you MAD: The Debunking of Spies, Superheroes, and Cold War Rhetoric in Mad Magazine’s ‘SPY vs SPY.’” The Journal of Popular Culture 40.1 (2007): 4–24. Print.

Ciesielski, Dennis J. “Secular Pragmatism: Kenneth Burke and the [Re]socialization of Literature and Theory.” Kenneth Burke and the 21st Century. Ed. Bernard L. Brock. New York: SUNY P, 1999. 243–67. Print.

Clark, Miriam Marty. “Art and Suffering in Two Late Poems by William Carlos Williams.” Literature and Medicine 23.2 (2004): 226–40. Print.

Enos, Richard Leo, et al. “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Rhetorical Criticism.” Rhetoric Review. 25.4 (2006): 357–87. Print.

Glicksberg, Charles I. “Kenneth Burke: The Critic’s Critic.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 36 (1937): 74–84. Print.

Grossman, Marshall, ed. Reading Renaissance Ethics. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.

Harris, Wendell. “The Critics Who Made Us: Kenneth Burke.” The Sewanee Review 96.3 (Summer 1988): 452–63. Print.

Japp, Phyllis M. “‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’: Reclaiming Burke for Feminist Scholarship.” Kenneth Burke and the 21st-Century. Ed. Bernard L. Brock. Albany: SUNY P, 200: 113–30.

Jay, Paul. “Criticism as Equipment for Living.” Horns of Plenty, Malcolm Cowley and His Generation. 2.1 (Spring 1989): 27-39. Print.

—. “Kenneth Burke.” The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2005. Web. 25 Oct. 2009.

Kostelanetz, Richard. “A Mind That Cannot Stop Exploding.” New York Times Book Review (15 Mar. 1981): 11, ff. Print.

Lewis, Camille Kaminski. Romancing the Difference: Kenneth Burke, Bob Jones University, and the Rhetoric of Religious Fundamentalism. Waco: Baylor UP, 2007. Print.

Matula, Theodore. “Pow! To the People: The Make-Up’s Reorganization of Punk Rhetoric.” Popular Music and Society 30.1 (Feb. 2007): 19–38. Print.

Ott, Brian L., and Beth Bonnstetter. “We’re at Now, Now: Spaceballs as Parodic Tourism.” Southern Communication Journal 72.4 (2007): 309-27. Print.

Pease, Donald. “Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke: The Nonsymbolizable (Trans)action.” boundary 2 30.2 (2003): 65–96. Print.

Rueckert, William H. Encounters with Kenneth Burke. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994. Print.

Smith, Erin A. “‘Jesus My Pal’: Reading and Religion in Middlebrow America.” Canadian Review of American Studies 37.2 (2007): 147–81. Print.

Veneciano, Jorge Daniel. “Louis Armstrong, Bricolage, and the Aesthetics of Swing.” Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies. Ed. Robert O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Green. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. 256–77. Print.

Equipment for Living

Poetry

One man attains self expression by becoming a sailor, another by becoming a poet.

—Counter-Statement (53)