Kenneth Burke (above right), from "Negative Emphasis: the Elegy, or Plaint" in "Poetic Categories" (1937)--


"William James, for instance, complained that Schopenhauer was CONTENT with his pessimism. He wanted a world he could bark at. And unquestionably, once a man has PERFECTED his complaint, he is more at home with sorrow than he would be without it. He has developed an equipment, and the integrity of his character is best upheld by situations that enable him to use it. Otherwise he would have to become either disintegrated or reborn. As a child, Augustine said, one learns to "avenge oneself by weeping"--and if one matures the same device by the use of adult material, one may paradoxically be said to have found a way of "accepting" life even while symbolizing its "rejection." In such cases, "acceptance" does come very close to "passiveness." The elegiac, the "wailing wall," may serve well for individual trickeries in one's relation to the obligations of struggle--but if it becomes organized as a collective movement, you may feel sure that a class of people will arise to "move in on" it, exploiting it to a point where more good reasons for complaint are provided, until the physical limits of the attitude are reached. Like humor, it is a frame that does not properly gauge the situation: when under its spell, one does not tend to size up his own resources accurately--but in contrast with humor, it really SPREADS the disproportion between the weakness of the self and the magnitude of the situation."