Project Director

Jackson, Richard

Department

Dept. of English

Publisher

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Place of Publication

Chattanooga (Tenn.)

Abstract

In choosing which questions to ask of Mr. Berry, I was interested in the environment, physical and spiritual, that gives rise to the poems. The Sabbath poems, for instance, come from the author's meditations as he passes through places and spaces of time where, as Mr. Berry has written, "the heart and mind are open and aware." As Mr. Berry is intimately concerned with cultivating land, so these are moments to be cultivated whose fruits are poems. I am interested in how the place in which the poems are written participates in their creation. If we are to keep alive the possibility of these moments, we need to take care of the places. On the one hand these moments are sown in the earth, in the act of caring for and using the land; they are prepared through intimacy with a place. On the other hand, they are cultivated by habits of mind. How much is the work of the mind, writing poetry in this case, of a piece with the work of the body, or here, farming? It seems to me that Mr. Berry's poems are spoken or sung from a definite place, and that the place shapes the voice of the speaker. Taking up Milton's notion that "the mind is its own place," it seems that Mr. Berry's poems seek to bring the mind to rest in the place where the speaker is; to achieve a meeting, an alignment of the two places.

Degree

B. A.; An honors thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Bachelor of Arts.

Date

11-2005

Subject

Pastoral poetry, American

Name

Berry, Wendell, 1934-

Discipline

Literature in English, North America

Document Type

Theses

Extent

ii, 35 leaves

DCMI Type

Text

Language

English

Call Number

LB2369.5 .G545 2005

Rights

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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