Burkes’ Prose Style
Burke
was an Anglo-Irish statesman, author, orator and political philosopher. He was
not only a great orator but also a prolific writer. As he was a one of the
finest parliamentary orators in Britain, his prose style is characterized by
proportion, dignity and harmony.
Burkes’ is the prose of an orator. He employs all the rhetorical devices and figures in his writing. His style is the most strictly suited to the subject. Burke is a writer of romantic prose. The relation between Burke and the Romanticist is his power of investing with interest and color, the past experience of the race, and of making it appeal to the imagination.
Poetry
is life force, the moving force of Burke's’ speech. In fact, he is the poet in
prose. His eloquence is remarkable and his wisdom is profound and
contemplative. He speaks in figures, images, symbols. The musical cadence of
his sentences reflects the influence of his wide reading of poetry. His
passions and feelings, his personal agony and anxiety towards the tyranny of
the East India Company finds a spontaneous expression in his speech.
Burke's’ style is dignified rather than
graceful. His speech is all through marked by the devices of the orator-rhythm,
alliteration, assonance, consonance, repetition, careful arrangement and
balance of part etc. He is a master of what is called amplification. His prose
is response to all the demands of thought and emotion, all the moods and tones.
Burke
uses antitheses to sharpen the edge of an argument in the right place. In his
speeches, he uses irony and sarcasm and these are his favorite weapons which
supply his deficiency in the lack of humor. His ‘Speech on the East India
Bill’ is replete with ironies uttered in sarcastic tone. For example when he
says that the East India Company has 60,000 armed men, it runs the commerce of
‘half the globe’, he actually means that it is not supposed to have say so very
subtle irony.
Burke
had a wealth of classical allusions and historical illustrations which are
unmistakable proofs of his scholarship and erudition. Other devices used by
Burke are: rhetorical anticipation of an opponent’s objections, his pretended
modesty, his colloquialisms, understatements, inversions, epigrams and
condensed metaphor.
To
sup up, we can say that Burke is the greatest master in English of the rhetoric
of political wisdom.
No comments:
Post a Comment