A CLOSE READING OF WENDELL BERRY'S THE FARM

Abstract

This thesis will be a close reading of Wendell Berry’s 1995 poem, The Farm. This work is a long-form poem in which Berry outlines the tasks and everyday to-dos of life on his farm. He also includes long descriptions of the land on which his farm occupies. In this essay, I will argue how Berry is commenting on the dialectic exchange between the act of saying and the act of doing. This thesis will demonstrate to readers how Berry makes this assessment through the lens of genre, his personal beliefs reflected in the work, and how those beliefs relate to greater philosophy on labor. In my pursuit of these topics, I have found that Berry’s The Farm is classified as a georgic pastoral as it grapples with the way that pastoral lends itself to the language of describing the land, while the georgic lends itself to describing how to tend to that land. I also found the way in which Berry’s personal beliefs are put into action by the way he writes his poetry and the work he does on his farm. And finally, I concluded how Berry’s actualized labor and management of the farm is somewhat in line with Marxist beliefs on community and the alienation of labor.