Moving the Dark to Wholeness : the Elegies of Wendell Berry

Abstract

With each year, Wendell Berry claims a more significant position among contemporary American poets. 1 From his common beginnings as one of a generation of poets trained in the precepts of the New Criticism he has pursued his own “path,” as he calls it, with uncommon intellectual rigor and poetic sensitivity. In our age of weak religious faith, many poets, faced with death and the threat of nuclear devastation, have fallen into sterility or despair. Berry, however, over the course of his career has come to terms with death and made its acceptance central to his philosophy of affirmation. For him, acceptance of death makes possible human love, fidelity, and the perpetuation of the community of men on earth. Like so many poets of his generation, Berry has developed as an artist by escaping the ubiquitous enchantment of Understanding Poetry . Under the influence of Brooks and Warren, Berry began his career writing individual, “well-made” lyrics that emphasized paradox and irony, and drew for inspiration from the Elizabethans by way of Yeats and T. S. Eliot. A former Kentucky farm boy “exiled” to the freshman writing department of New York University, Berry found in the new critical approach a distancing irony to protect his sensibility from the city’s hostile, alien environment: