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Edmund Burke's Idea of the Body Corporate: A Study in Imagery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Walter D. Love
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Extract

Burke is recognized as master of a language highly figurative, full of grace and telling images. But the imagery of nonfiction prose is not so much studied as the imagery of poetry, drama, and fiction. It should be. It reveals a great deal about a thinker. I have not studied Burke's imagery to spy on his personal life, conscious or subconscious, as some students of other writers do, nor have I tried to evaluate his style. I have used it as an oblique way of getting at the meaning of some of his concepts and I think it reveals something about his place in the history of ideas, making him a stalwart of eighteenth-century ways of thinking, instead of a harbinger of the nineteenth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , April 1965 , pp. 184 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1965

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References

1 Volume and page numbers in parentheses following quotations are from The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (Boston, 1884)Google Scholar. All italics within quotes are Burke's. The various kinds of imagery noticed can be much more lavishly illustrated by quotes than is done within the confines of this article.

2 Davie, Donald, Purity of Diction in English Verse (London, 1952), p. 35Google Scholar.

3 Annual Register (1761), p. 301.

4 See a drawing of Burke's, house in The Burke Newsletter, III (1961), 57Google Scholar.

5 Poetic Imagery; Illustrated from Elizabethan Literature (New York, 1924), p. 169Google Scholar.

6 The Eighteenth Century Background (New York, 1940), pp. 244–45Google Scholar.

7 A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations, ed. Marvin, J. G. (Boston, 1843), pp. 87, n. 2, and 65Google Scholar.

8 The History of England (London, 1830), I, 72Google Scholar.

9 University of California Publications in Sociology and Social Institutions, III, no. 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1956).

10 Ibid., 114–15.

11 Ibid., 115.