SOURCE: “Wendell Berry: Love Poet,” in The University of Mississippi Studies in English, Vol. V, 1984-1987, pp. 100-09.

In the following essay, Hiers asserts that Berry “both inherits and creates an agrarian ethos which sustains poetic visions of love unique among contemporary poets” and compares his poetry with that of Theodore Roethke and Anne Sexton.

Wendell Berry—poet, novelist, essayist—has produced an impressive canon since his first novel, Nathan Coulter, appeared in 1960. In two decades he has published three novels, several volumes of verse, and five volumes of essays. Two interrelated themes unify all of his mature work: man's proper relationship with the land and, a corollary, his harmonious relationship with his neighbors. These concerns place Berry squarely in the agrarian tradition of Southern literature, a position he finds both intellectually satisfying and aesthetically essential. Unlike many of his agrarian predecessors, however, Berry actually farms as well...