Wendell Berry and the Poetics of Marriage and Embodiment‪.‬

Marriage and farming are not topics one readily associates with the subject of poetry in the modern world. That is, of course, unless you are Wendell Berry, who seems to think about them all the time. Marriage, farming, poetry, and the body: Just where and when did we start our collective cultural journey with these topics? If we were to ask Berry, I imagine he might say we began in Eden or just a bit of east of it, long before there were poets to write such things down, and ever since that time we have been learning and relearning the truth about them. As we look for the point in the literary record where our thinking about these subjects first came together powerfully, even primordially, Berry suggests where it might be. He locates the point in the Odyssey in a long passage about which he writes: "Nowhere else that I know are the connections between marriage and household and the earth so fully and so carefully understood" (Recollected 305).