SOURCE: “Wendell Berry: The Mad Farmer and Wilderness,” in The Kentucky Review, Vol. VIII, No. 2, Summer, 1988, pp. 40-52.

In the following essay, Gamble explores the relationship between wilderness and agriculture in Berry's poetry.

Wendell Berry envisions a moral agriculture that transforms the farmer from the enemy of wilderness to its most devoted guardian. This is one of Berry's most paradoxical themes, for traditionally the farmer's role has always been to destroy the wilderness; he clears away the forest with its vegetable and animal life to plant the crops and produce the agricultural abundance that makes civilization possible. Further, anyone with a rural background knows that farmers traditionally seem stubbornly blind to the virtues of the wild.¹ On a farm, wildlife is most often seen as a pest, and nature in general as an obstacle to be removed. Yet in both his poetry and his prose, Berry argues that...