Kenneth Burke among the moderns:Counter‐statementas counter statement

Abstract

It is no overstatement to claim that Kenneth Burke was weaned on modernism, that indeed he was a pivotal figure among the remarkable moderns who gathered in Greenwich Village in the years just before and after World War I. Yet the observation bears repeating nonetheless. Born in 1897 in Pittsburgh and educated there through high school, Burke moved with his parents in 1915 to an apartment in Weehawken, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from 42nd Street in New York City. Though he studied at Ohio State during the spring semester of 1916 (with his thoroughly modernist friend James Light) and though he commuted from Weehawken to Columbia University throughout 1917, Burke gradually determined to take his instruction from Greenwich Village rather than from the university; having insinuated himself into the literary and intellectual scene, he moved to Greenwich Village early in 1918. There he met, associated with, befriended, and/or worked with a host of Village writers, artists, and critics, including (to mention only the ones that seem most prominent today) William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Eugene O'Neill, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Van Wyck Brooks, Edmund Wilson, Allen Tate, Jean Toomer, and Katherine Anne Porter. Burke was on hand for the most experimental and successful period of the Provincetown Players, and he followed political and artistic developments in The Masses. While spending much of his time after 1922 writing, reading, editing, and translating at his Andover, New Jersey farm, Burke remained very much a physical and verbal presence in the Greenwich Village modernist scene, contributing poetry, fiction, criticism, and translations to modernist magazines. As an editorial assistant at The Dial, the most prominent such magazine of the era, he provided editorial services on behalf of Williams, Crane, Ezra Pound, Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, Arthur Schnitzler, and Wallace Stevens. And he maintained his social and artis