nuke-age accessories no less in demand

"CIVIL DEFENSE"

No first-class war can now be fought
Till all that can be sold is bought.
So do get going helter-skelter
And sell each citizen a shelter
Wherein, while being bombed and strafed, he
Can reek and retch and rot in safety.

A ditty penned by Kenneth Burke and published in the September 24 issue of the Nation. Let's not think for a moment that the duck-and-cover civil defense anxieties of the 1950s had very much abated by 1960. The Cuban Missile Crisis of a year later certainly re-intensified these concerns, but they hadn't lessened greatly in the months immediately preceding. Of course Burke's complaint isn't merely about atomic hysteria. He's also here satirizing the commercializing and literal capitalization of nuke-age accessories.

that good old-time logology

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.