Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2005: Selected papers from 'Going Romance', Utrecht, 8-10 December 2005 Book

One of the most noteworthy aspects of Wendell Berry's writing'his novels, poetry, and essays'is the vision of community life that nurtures and binds together its individuals, land, and animals. This vision is everywhere present in this collection of essays, even though they are first and foremost literary, exploring topics such as the nature of poetic inspiration, the cultural work of poetry, and the writers that Berry finds most meaningful and inspiring (Shakespeare, Dante, Whitman, Dryden [yes, that's right!], among others) and those he finds most limiting and troubling (Shelley comes under particular and sustained attack). Throughout the essays, Berry makes a call for what he deems the "disciplined imagination," an imagination that rather than turning inward to focus entirely on the isolated mind (what Berry finds in much Romantic and modern writing) instead attempts to balance interior with exterior, grounding itself thoroughly in place and being concerned with relation, dependence, propriety, proportion, and balance (you can see why he doesn't like Shelley). Structuring Berry's vision of harmony and wholeness are a set of fundamental analogies that appear not only in these essays but also in his entire work'such as that between marriage and farming, cultural change and biology, and imagination and the natural world. For me, the highlight of this brilliant book was his discussion of Shakespeare's As You Like It, including his citation of lines in which the Duke comments on his exiled life in the forest, lines that in some ways point to Berry's own vision: "And this our life, exempt from public haunt, / Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything." What these lines leave out about Berry is that throughout his career he has never stood "exempt from public haunt," but instead has sought to create an art and a way of life that stand against the political and industrial terrors that now reign.