SOURCE: “A More Mingled Music: Wendell Berry's Ambivalent View of Language,” in Modern Poetry Studies, Vol. XI, Nos. 1-2, 1982, pp. 35-56.

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

Ever since the appearance of The Broken Ground in 1964,¹ Wendell Berry has devoted a considerable portion of his work to the continuing evaluation of language and the function of art, especially poetry. Again and again in his prose, Berry emphasizes the importance of language, not only for the man of letters, but for every individual living in an increasingly technological world. His essay “In Defense of Literacy”² lampoons those American universities which have begun to teach language and literature as specialities. To teach our language and literature as such, according to Berry, is to submit to the assumption “that literacy is no more than an ornament” (CH...