1897-1993
Although he never obtained a university degree Kenneth Burke was among the intellectual elite on the Dial staff and served as editor, translator, advisor, and critic from 1920-1929. Along with Waldo Frank, also a Dial contributor, he had a significant literary relationship with a black author, Jean Toomer, and provided the influence for his Cane (1923) a short story cycle which would become a major influence during the Harlem renaissance1. In his (long) later life he became a major philosopher and aesthetic theorist. Divorced in 1933 and married his first wife's sister. Most major work was completed and published during this time. He had five children, and was grandfather to Harry Chapin, musician, who died tragically in 1981.

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Kenneth Burke wrote some ingenious (sometimes incomprehensible) poetry1 - Click Here for a sample

The Kenneth Burke Society
Resources Page at Colorado University
Purdue University Virtual Burke Parlour (!)
Johns Hopkins University Press

"Mr Frank is as serious as Buddha, which is a dangerous thing to be in an age which could produce Ulysses ... Structure is the first principle of a work, not the last"2

This conviction that art and emotion must be separated led to his replacing Paul Rosenfeld as Dial music critic (Musical Chronicles) later, and providing a more technical, less reactive, musical criticism in the last couple of years of The Dial.

"Form in literature is an arousing and fulfillment of desires. A work has form in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence. The five aspects of form may be discussed as progressive form (subdivided into syllogistic and qualitative progression), repetitive form, conventional form, and minor or incidental forms."3