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IN THE SUMMER OF 1943, two literary scholars were working on Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Kenneth Burke's "Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats" appeared first, in the autumn edition of Accent; Cleanth Brooks published his "History without Footnotes: An Account of Keats' Urn" just a few months later in the Sewanee Review. Obviously embarrassed by the peculiar concurrence, Brooks added a note to his essay, in which he admits having come upon Burke's some months after having completed his own. Yet despite the many similarities between both, Brooks says, he had resisted the urge to make alterations. Rather, he writes, "I am happy to find that two critics with methods and purposes so different should agree so thoroughly as we do on the poem. I am pleased, for my part, therefore, to acknowledge the amount of duplication which exists between the two essays, counting it as rather important corroboration of a view of the poem which will probably seem to some critics overingenious" (89).1 Coming across a footnote that disrupts the confident tone and wholeness of execution that usually characterize Brooks's writing is a notable occasion in itself, but its appearance in an essay whose very title condemns the practice of adding them is striking to the point of bewilderment. Yet despite the large amount of scholarly response Brooks's essay has received, the reference has been largely neglected. Reprinted as "Keats's Sylvan Historian: History without Footnotes," the essay became widely anthologized as the key to Brooks's brilliant classic The Well Wrought Urn; Burke's reading of the ode, on the other hand, went the way of the footnote, sliding almost unobtrusively from the margins of the page to the edges of history.2
To a considerable extent, Brooks himself can be held responsible for the apparent ease with which we have omitted part of his essay from our comments. If historians needs footnotes as forensic evidence that their accounts are supported by sufficient amounts of study devoted to incontestable sources, Brooks's essay upholds that literary criticism moves on different-and ultimately more truthful-grounds of legitimacy. Thus stripped of their authoritative weight, footnotes degenerate into gathering places for critical debris, short references or digressions that do not permeate the main body of the text. In its...