I have read several times the long title essay of Kenneth Burke's book The Philosophy of Literary Form, and still with the sense of an adventure. It is like following the intrepid explorer who is making a path through the jungle. I indicate the range and density of the speculative field, which is poetic theory, and junglelike; and also the emancipation of Burke the explorer's mind from common academic restraints—especially from the overall cast of sobriety which he, in a cold tone, calls "neo-Aristotelian." If he suffers from a restraint, I should think it is a constitutional distaste against regarding poetic problems as philosophic ones. I suppose his feeling may be that poetry is something bright and dangerous, and philosophy is something laborious and arid, and you cannot talk about the one in the terms of the other without a disproportion, and breach of taste. Who would...