Imagining the situation in which Burke found himself as he wrote PC should be easy for Americans who matured as New Critics during the 1950s only later to find themselves forced to revisit, in the 1960s, convictions that once seemed settled for good. Richard Ohmann, for example, recounts the invigoration he experienced internalizing the values of New Critical “close reading – exactness, sensitivity to shades of feeling, the need to see pattern and order, the effort to shut out from consciousness one's own life-situation while reading the poem, and to pry the words loose from their social origins” – as well as the divorce he later experienced between working in this literary culture and living through the upheavals of the 1960s. What Vietnam did to Ohmann's generation, the Great Depression did to Burke's.

For PC's second edition, Burke wrote a “Prologue” (xlvii–lix) that begins, “This book was written in the early days of the Great Depression, at a time when there was a general feeling that our traditional ways were headed for a tremendous change, maybe even a permanent collapse.