Ecocritical Concerns in the Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

Abstract

Richard Kerridge defines Ecocriticism as "literary and cultural criticism from an environmental viewpoint." Wendell Berry, a man close to the land because of his work as a farmer, is an American poet, writing in Georgic tradition. His Sabbath poems, though having religious connotations, have deep concerns for the natural world. In his poems his awareness about the consequences of the misuse of natural resources can be found. Though he has written the poems in the collection titled as This Day: Sabbath Poems Collected and New 1979-2013 (2014), during a solitary walk on the Sabbath day, these poems, as he points out, "does not dependably lead to rest" His poems, while admiring nature as eternal, unbound and timeless, condemn human economy-oriented mindset and industrialization with mention of environmental issues they have invited. They are the mirror to the natural world, which is no more natural due to unmaking of it done by human hands. This paper will ecocritically analyze Sabbath poems written in 2007 from the above-mentioned collection.