“But I mean his poetry is actually pretty good” – for Wendell Berry (1934-2026)

Following my obituary for The Land magazine in my previous post I’d intended to publish in this next one my article on landlordism that appeared in the final issue. Instead, it turns out that another obituary takes precedence – in this case for Wendell Berry, who died last Sunday. There are others better placed than me to give a proper account of his life and work. Here, I’ll just make a few personal remarks which I hope might serve, however inadequately, as an act of remembrance. I became an adult in the 1980s, at least in the quantitative sense of accumulating enough years to meet official definitions, although not alas in any more meaningful qualitative way. I emerged from a semi-rural but modern and non-agrarian childhood with a liking for nature and a vague sense that the way people lived in my southern England homelands didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but without much idea of what to do about it. Studying anthropology at university, along with Marxism (the two went pretty much…