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Wendell Berry’s Unrelenting Vision

The poet wrote for The Nation for decades, always demonstrating conscience and prescience.

The beloved poet and essayist Wendell Berry died this summer at the age of 92. In an essay in The Nation in 2019, Jedediah Britton-Purdy observed that Berry was one of those rare figures who received positive attention in both left-leaning journals like Dissent and right-leaning ones like The American Conservative. He lauded Berry for writing “against all forms of violence and destruction—of land, communities, and human beings.” Through all of Berry’s work, Britton-Purdy wrote, ran a consistent note of “praise for what he admires: the quiet, mostly uncelebrated labor and affection that keep the world whole and might still redeem it.”

Starting in 1961, Berry contributed more than two dozen poems, essays, and book reviews to The Nation. Again and again in his work, Berry observed that a healthy democracy depended on a healthy land, and vice versa. He always made his case in elegant, clear, and compelling language and with........

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