That June Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley were continuing their long, longtime correspondence. Now Burke was telling Cowley of the new book he was putting together out of some new material and some lectures he had given a few years back. The book was published in 1961 as The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies on Logology (Beacon Press of Boston). The foreword makes this bold statement: "The subject of religion falls under the head of rhetoric in the sense that rhetoric is the art of persuasion, and religious cosmogonies are designed, in the last analysis, as exceptionally thoroughgoing modes of persuasion" (p. v). Dell Hymes, reviewing the book for The Journal of American Folklore felt he had to specify that "Burke does not here regard persuasion as inherently bad (or good)." He knows "the social necessity of verbal persuasion" and is a master at insights into "the master debunkers of verbal persuasion, the Marxists, Freudians, et al."*
"Once," Burke writes in a Burkean footnote to a long paragraph about symbolic meaning, "when I was analyzing the symbolism of sun and moon in Coleridge's poem, 'The Ancient Mariner,' a student raised this objection: 'I'm tired of hearing about the symbol sun in poems, I want a poem that has the real sun in it.' Answer: If anybody ever turns up with a poem that has the real sun in it, you'd better be about ninety-three million miles away.... [Anyway] even things of nature can become 'symbolic'" (9).
The most remarkable part of this book is the seventy-page chapter on "The First Three Chapters of Genesis."
* vol. 75, no 297, 1962.
Is '60 the moment when the end of the end of the Old Left had been reached and the New Left began to emerge? Is it the final ascendancy, in certain scenes at least, of poetic postmodernity? Surely the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry that year suggests this, but then again--once again--we look back on "New" here and see continuity. The rhetoric of the Kennedy-Nixon contest made much less of a dent than everyone (at the time as well as since) claimed, so one wonders why were such great claims made? 
Had we come to expect "1960" to be truly ubiquitously modern in a way that the 1950s really were not--not quite? And what specifically does "modern" mean in the Kennedyesque talk then and now about the torch being passed to a new generation, etc.? The First Lady really meant "modernist" when Camelotians said "modern." What about the others across the new young cultural leadership? I've been surprised by how frequently the 
"Beat movement" was covered in 1960 in the mainstream press. I was expecting a fair measure but I've found tonnage. 1960 was the year when the figure of the beat was beginning to find acceptance, although still 80% of these stories are mocking, rebels-without-cause condescension. For anyone whose analysis made an impact nationally, do these antipolitical adolescents count as part of the "new young cultural leadership"? No, but rather than the two being opposites, they fall along a Continuum of the New American. Now that's a change for '60.
