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Wendell Berry is a greatly skilled, prophetically Christian poet whose poetry, quite apart from his fiction and essays and from his standing as a public figure, deserves a serious reappraisal. These volumes— a retrospective of 35 years' work, and a new series first published here in its entirety—might inspire such a reappraisal, for they show with particular clarity how Berry has worked out the premises of his literary vision.
Berry's poetry has never received its due from academic critics, and one reason is that his premises are not theirs. Berry shows an awareness of this difference when he describes himself, in the preface to A Timbered Choir, as an "amateur poet" "belong[ing] to no school of poetry, but rather to my love for certain poems by other poets." Modest as it is, this is a canonical gesture. In place of a school defined by technique or manifesto, it lays claim to a community of like minds held together by mutual re cognition and by affection. Writing as an amateur implies a use for poetry, and a readership outside the prescriptions of the standard professional career.
This readership does not exclude academics, of course, but it includes many other readers—environmentalists, Christian social activists, small-community advocates, farmers, neo-Luddites—who cherish the art of these poems for its power to render their motives and loyalties. Poems like "The Peace of Wild Things" (from Openings, 1968) and "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" (from The Country of Marriage, 1973) have be come classics of the green conscience.
Such commitments, in turn, have required a poetic style that academic criticism—which wants to free language to its own poses and innovations—does not know how to value. To convince us that a commitment is right, to make us feel its urgency, you need a style of plain speech and open feeling, sparing and traditional in metaphor; a style that welcomes eloquence and dignity, where the language of belief and attachment is at home.
What is remarkable about Berry's Selected Poems, as one rereads them, is precisely their openness of feeling. They are frankly about wonder, grief, anger, friendship, conjugal love, the fear of death, the love of place and creature. Sometimes they are simply personal and literal. Sometimes they frame an impulse in both simple and complex forms: "Another place! / it's enough to grieve me— / that old dream of going, / of becoming a better man / just by getting up and going / to a better place." This verse is so relaxed you almost miss the repetitions that make its music. But then, almost immediately—in "The Sycamore," one of Berry's keynote poems—the same dream of belonging has taken on tragedy and nobility: "There is no year it has flourished in / that has not harmed it. … It bears the gnarls of its history / healed over."
Joyful in his commitments, Berry knows nonetheless that they provoke unease and suspicion in the literary world and in its sponsoring culture. When he writes (in A Timbered Choir) "I am not a modern man. / In my work I would be known / by forebears of a thousand years / if they were here to see it," he is dramatizing his alienation from the world of machines and profit margins. In the modern world his "ancient happiness" is imperiled. Yet the dramatization itself—that is, the rhetoric of this poem—challenges us to ask if Berry's sense of cultural crisis is accurate. And to be offered that challenge by a poem is unique.
Unique is a misshapen word nowadays, but in its original meaning, one of a kind, I think it appropriate to Berry's experiment in living and thinking. He gave us the key to that experiment by writing (in The Long-Legged House, 1969) that "whereas most American writers—and even most Americans— of my time are displaced persons, I am a placed person." For the many who take Berry's work as exemplary, this is the defining motive.
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