53 Placing the Poetic Corrective: William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Burke, and the Poetic Imaginary Stephen Llano St. John’s University To consider language as a means of information or knowl- edge is to consider it epistemologically, semantically, in terms of “science.” To consider it as a mode of action is to consider it in terms of “poetry.” For a poem is an act, the symbolic act of the poet who made it—an act of such a nature that, in surviving as a structure or object, it enables us as readers to re-enact it. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (447) 1 Kenneth Burke, in his major work A Grammar of Motives, offers an analysis of Keats’s poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to demonstrate the potential of dramatistic criticism. The opening quote from that section of Grammar of Motives indicates a key distinction of the dramatist perspective from the scientiic: scientiic thought views language as representation of an act occurring elsewhere, while dramatism sees language as a particular kind of act, a member of the category “action” instead of action’s weak second. This “symbolic action” is the centerpiece of Burke’s theory not only of the human condition, but of rhetoric—the way we come together and pull apart in our relations with the world and with each other. The analysis is not important for its object, or for the particular critical insights, but vastly important for understanding Kenneth Burke’s unique contribution to criticism across a number of different ields. Kenneth Burke’s output of work as a critic and theorist is massive. Grasping the scope and scale of the ideas he engaged would take (and has taken) many scholarly book-length treatments of his central ideas, such as the scapegoat process, identiication/division, consubstantiality, the comic and tragic frames, and hierarchy. 2 I examine in this essay the oft- overlooked notion of the “poetic corrective,” which Burke leaves tantaliz- ingly underdeveloped in his book Permanence and Change. In this book, The Space Between, Volume V:1 2009 ISSN 1551-9309