Wendell Berry, Seeds of Hope, and the Survival of Creation

Abstract

Poets have commonly speculated about the purposes and effects of their works. Perhaps most famously, the British Romantics posited a version of the poet as prophetic mouthpiece of God. In Percy Bysshe Shelley's memorable formulation, "Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present. ... the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" ("Defense" 1087). In America, this lofty concept of the poet was taken up by the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson:[The Poet] stands among partial man for the complete man .... The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre.... whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down. (242,244) Walt Whitman took seriously Shelley's and Emerson's pronouncements, audaciously claiming, ''American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people.... His spirit responds to his country's spirit.... he incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes" (713). Although Victorian types like the Fireside Poets, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier, were somewhat more restrained, they still saw their poetic works as contributing to both the democratization and ethical progress of America-and the world.Opposed to these nineteenth-century tendencies was a more archly modern view, which tended to dismiss romantic ideas about art. Instead, modernists attempted to create what Richard Poirier once called a "world elsewhere;' meaning in part that properly modernist poets were uninterested 297