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Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry

Last updated on: September 1, 2026 at 5:06 pm by Fred Clark

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Wendell Berry 2026-09-01T17:06:15-04:00 Fred Clark

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The luminous, prickly, joyful, poet/farmer/novelist/essayist/conservationist Wendell Berry has died at age 92.

I first encountered Berry through his essays, which are forceful, fierce, and fearsome. Like the essays of James Baldwin, they have an unnerving clarity of language and a clarity of thought that make you wonder which came first (both — the answer is both).

Berry’s essays are about farming and poetry and marriage and community and fidelity and responsibility. I am neither a farmer, nor a poet, but a Wendell Berry essay on farming or on poetry was never only about poetry or about farming, but about all those other things which, for him, were inseparably related and which, for you the reader, would be inseparably related as well by the time you’d finished reading.

Berry was Southern and Baptist and Southern Baptist, but not like that. He was always a pervasively religious writer, but rarely explicitly so. This is reflected in the title of the first book of his that I read, the collection of essays titled “What Are People For?” That’s telos and purpose and meaning and the sacredness of creation.

“There are no unsacred places,” Berry wrote. “there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” Likewise, there are no unsacred people.

I often think of that title as a useful way of evaluating politics and politicians. For some politics and some politicians, “What Are People For?” is a question to be answered by pollsters who measure the people’s opinions based on a menu of options, for and against, and set an agenda based on what most people tell the pollsters they are “for.” Other forms of politics and politicians understand that question the way Berry did, and allow that understanding to shape their agenda.

After devouring several volumes of Berry’s essays — Home Economics, Standing By Words, The Unsettling of America, The Hidden Wound — I turned to his poetry, which is lovely, dark, and deep.

Here is one of his Sabbath poems:

Whatever happens
those who have learned
to love one another
have made their way
to the lasting world
and will not leave,
whatever happens.

And here is a bit of what I think of as the Berriest of Berry’s poems, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front“:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands. …

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

And here is perhaps his most famous and beloved poem, “The Peace of Wild Things”:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry also wrote novels and short stories, nearly all set in a fictionalized version of his home county in rural Kentucky. My mother loved these books and I loved reading them with her. (At one point we got out a piece of paper and worked out the timelines and the family trees, and sketched a map — Berry’s fiction is a work of world-building that Tolkien would have admired.)

One of my favorite passages in his fiction is one I cannot find just now. One of Berry’s protagonists, I forget which, is in an airport, watching travelers pass by and looking up at the big board announcing departures and arrivals. Beautiful, remarkable people are passing by on their way to beautiful, remarkable places — Paris, New York, London, Rome — and he ponders all the possibilities and possible lives available to them and even to him. Those other places may be good places and those other lives may be good lives, but they are not where he belongs, and so he wishes those beautiful strangers well and he chooses, again, to choose to return to where he belongs.

That airport scene is full of Berry’s wise, joyful fidelity. And it displays a generosity that overcomes the crankiness that sometimes creeps into Berry’s essays. It recognizes that those other lives can also be good and right and meaningful — that some people, after all, do belong in places like Paris or New York, and that Port William and Port Henry are not the only sacred, or the only undesecrated places, where one can belong and live a meaningful life of belonging.

“Find out who you are and do it on purpose,” the late great poet of Tennessee said. And Wendell Berry, the late great poet of Kentucky, did just that. He chose that and stood by his choosing. He found his purpose and he did it on purpose and he never looked back.

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