Aristotle had said in The Poetics, Richards explains, that greatest thing by is to have a command of metaphor' (p. 89).* Richards finds himself in accord here, but not with what follows, for Aristotle went on to say (as Richards quotes), This alone cannot be imparted to another: it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances. I do not know how much influence remark has had, Richards comments, but question it for a moment and we can discover in it . . . here at the very beginning of the subject, the evil presence of three of the assumptions which have ever since prevented the study of this greatest thing by far from taking the place it deserves among our studies, and from advancing, as theory and practice, in the ways open to it.

In The New York Times Book Review of March 15, 1981, Richard Kostelanetz described Kenneth Burke as implacably American, citing in evidence Harold Bloom's earlier assertion that Burke was strongest living representative of the American Critical tradition, and perhaps the largest single source of that tradition since its founder, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1 1). Others too have seen Burke as vintage American: Merle Brown, for example, who wrote sixteen years ago that Burke, like John Dewey and Van Wyck Brooks, was clearly the man of the American 20s who sought to close the gap he saw widening then between the specialists and the masses (8-9);' and, more recently, Bloom's Yale colleague Angus Fletcher, who, in his English Institute essay, sees Burke as the American individualist and romantic hero: