SOURCE: “Moving the Dark to Wholeness: The Elegies of Wendell Berry,” in The Literary Review, Vol. 31, No. 3, Spring, 1988, pp. 279-92.

In the following essay, Triggs underscores the importance of Berry's elegiac verse.

With each year, Wendell Berry claims a more significant position among contemporary American poets. 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...