In the following essay, Whited views Berry's work as a repudiation of consumer culture in favor of an appreciation and understanding of a value system based on spiritual, communal, and familial concerns.

In the following essay, Knot examines the role of wilderness in Berry's work.

In the following essay, Collins asserts that Berry's poetry and prose stresses the importance of poetry in a technological world.

In the following essay, Triggs underscores the importance of Berry's elegiac verse.

In the following essay, Gamble explores the relationship between wilderness and agriculture in Berry's poetry.

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.

In the following essay, Johnson contends that Berry's poetry affirms the sacred in the land, creature, and community, offering the reader “an ecology centered in spirit.”

In their differences, Wendell Berry's Recollected Essays and The Gift of Good Land balance each other nicely. The first, a selection of descriptive and reflective essays drawn from five previously published books, presents the major themes of his thought as it has developed over the years (1965–1980). It is essentially a personal book … though the reflective pieces go far beyond the personal. The second is a collection of articles written since the publication of The Unsettling of Ameri...

Since 1960 Wendell Berry has published five books of poetry, three volumes of essays and three novels. With the recent publication of two books of poetry, Farming: A Handbook and The Country of Marriage, and a volume of essays, A Continuous Harmony, Berry has come to fruition as a major voice in America. By far his best work is his most recent, and so to read him chronologically is to observe steady growth in depth, refinement, and certainty…. Wendell Berry's transformation … has been a...

[The Unsettling of America] continues the exploration of Berry's central themes: agriculture considered historically and in its present state, and marriage and domesticity. Much of what he says is in response to the question he posed in a poem in Farming: A Handbook …: "What must a man do to be at home in the world?" He must, this latest book suggests, discover personal solutions for what are identified as the three crises we face: of character, agriculture and culture. All three...

One of the rewards of being a fairly faithful reader arrives when you open a new book and realize it's the one you've been reading toward for years. That has been this reader's experience with both of these books by Wendell Berry, Recollected Essays 1965–1980 and The Gift of Good Land…. These books are the kind that you spend months with, hate to give up, and plan to return to soon and often. There is that much pure pleasure in them, both in the spare and crafted elegance ...

Like E. B. White and Noel Perrin, Wendell Berry writes in the country, and he writes mainly about country life, but he owes nothing to either of these writers. His spiritual ancestor is Henry David Thoreau, and his Recollected Essays, though looser in structure than Walden, resembles it in several respects. Like Thoreau, his prose style is clear and utterly free of affectation. He read Thoreau as a young man, and was clearly influenced by him, but his prose style may have come to him as much from his upbrin...

Clearing includes history quite as specific, localized and personal, yet runs no comparable risk. All his work in verse and prose is sustained by a pervasive vision, as much ethical as aesthetic, that gives weight and substance and depth to any thing or any figure named in it. The old-fashioned word for this was dedication; and it is consistent with Berry's freedom from trendy sophistication that his opening poem, "History," should include an invocation to the Muse. His historical preoc...

[In] Clearing, Wendell Berry tells the story of how he rescued a piece of Kentucky land, which had been neglected and abused by generations of past owners, and, through his own labors and the help of a few horses, brought it back to life…. Berry's self-imposed task is indeed a noble and an arduous one—just reading his descriptions of the work makes one's shoulders ache. The artistic goal is equally noble; in "Work Song," Berry states his wish to make "Memory,...

The Hidden Wound is an autobiographical meditation which also serves as an apologia. Berry attempts to justify his recent retreat to a Kentucky farm, where, having fled the life of an urban nomad, he has attempted to come to grips with both his and the nation's past. The "hidden wound" of the book's title is racism, and Berry's study of it is refreshingly free from the sloganeering which surrounds that issue today. Berry grew up on a farm in Kentucky, and his childhood mem...

[The Hidden Wound] is one of the finest documents on the racial question that has been published in recent years. It is a sincere, moving and inspirational account of one man's attempt to comprehend the ways in which racism has influenced him. Berry's central thesis is: "If white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly; the cost has been greater perhaps than we can yet know. If the white man has inflicted the would of ra...

They attached me to the earth. It is the experience of such attachment that Wendell Berry writes about in Farming: A Handbook. Indeed, the book has little to say about anything else; as much as any I can recall in recent years, it is a book of a single theme, played without significant variation. Berry has something he very badly wants to tell us. He said it in The Long-Legged House, a book of essays published in 1969, he said it again in The Hidden Wound (1970), an essay centered upon the author's e...

Clearing is familiar history; ecology; memoir: a poem about the making of a poem—the making of two poems, the one we read and the other: a farm and forty acres…. Berry is the most subtle of American naturists. The vocabulary of his emotion is even-tempered; far from unpoetic, he deprecates the more showy forensics that have commonly underlined his subject: despoliation and the way back. Clearing is a ruminating lyrical monologue in seven principal sections, delivered by a man who has chosen at...

No one could deny the nobility of Wendell Berry's dream of the sanctity of the soil. I will not comment on his techniques in Clearing,… they are all that we have read before by writers of equal talent in the free forms of William Carlos Williams. Occasionally he works skillfully at the traditional rhymed and metered verse, but Berry should be singled out for his vision. He is a poet who is a farmer, who is a professor of English, who cannot write an evil word about the work of living but must ...

The color and shadings of the work of poets come out of the life they choose to support their art, financially and spiritually. There are city poets and country poets, academic hacks and bohemians, politicians and recluses. Wendell Berry happens to be a farmer from Kentucky. His poetry, not unexpectedly, often returns to the study of the earth, the fields, the hills. His eighth collection [The Wheel] has a particular theme, however: the cycle called the Wheel of Life. Ordered in six sections, Berry's...

Sayings & Doings is for the most part an anthology of short epigrams heard in conversation in the country. In a short prefatory note Berry likens these poems to the "found objects" of the sculptors but insists that the verse form in which these epigrams appear is necessary because "it makes clear that memorable speech is measured speech."… Some, if not all, of these epigrams come close to the jokes of the "Hee-Haw" television program: the comparison is cr...

Berry's direct and easily understood verse [in A Part] is worlds removed from the self-indulgent and often contrived obscurity so common in contemporary poetry. "Clear" poetry can be amateurish, trite, and maudlin, but Berry's is the very opposite—intelligent, sensitive, and a pleasure to read. For the most part, the poems are nature poems that deal with such subjects as river ice, snow, trees, lilies, and the Kentucky scene. Two very nicely handled translations from Ronsa...