[Kenneth Burke's Language as Symbolic Action reveals] a mind for which the gods seem to have decreed equal shares of fertility and futility. Burke has produced a body of literary and social criticism second only to that of Edmund Wilson, yet it has not "added up." He has been less careful of his audience than Wilson, more interested in the permutation of his ideas, more self-indulgent and obsessive in his concerns. This is only one of many paradoxes surrounding Burke, for in his writings there is constant talk of "plays" and "strategies," and his theory of dramatism, as well as that of symbolic action, implies something beyond a merely personal catharsis….

Burke has been asking central questions about life, literature and method for 40 years, and his first collection of essays, Counter-Statement (1931), published in the same year as Wilson's Axel's Castle, helped to prove that American criticism was as...