Recipient of several prestigious honors, including the T S Eliot award and the Cleanth Brooks award for lifetime achievement, William Berry, the bard of Kentuckian nature, has been a votary of pristine nature. After leaving the job as a professor in soulless New York, he moved to his native central Kentucky and has been living the life of a farmer in his farm, where his imagination has taken root. A vehement critic of mechanization, like Thoreau, he also championed the cause of the small farmer, like Jefferson. To him the manifestation of the cycle of death and birth is affirmative, and he draws hope for sustenance even in the passing away of his maternal grandfather, whom he loved the most. The realization of every small part as a link with harmony greater than itself, is the enduring aspect of his poetry. A passionate activist of environmental protection, he is also against excessive government control and thoughtless wars, as in Vietnam. The present paper traces Berry's attachment to nature and his passionate evocation of the manifestations of nature, which ignites an analogous emotional response from a sensitive Indian reader.

They were on the blurb of a slim volume of The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry and I felt instantly inspired to explore the poetic output of Berry. In the backdrop of nuclear holocaust of the last century and the dastardly terrorist attack on the Twin Towers at the start of the present century and on the Taj Hotel in Mumbai the year before last year, there has been an insistent sway of despair, agonizingly echoed by Berry.

Hailing, as I do, from a small town on the banks of river Godavari, I was drawn to Berry, who is both emotionally and physically attached to his farm at Port Royal in Central Kentucky near Kentucky river, which joins the Ohio river, not far away. Born on August 5, 1934, in Henry County, Kentucky, Berry hails from a family of farmers for five generations. After his early education, he obtained BA and MA degrees from the University of Kentucky, Lexington. He attended a course in creative writing at Stanford University. On Guggenheim Fellowship, Berry visited Italy and France. In his early poetic work, he was under the influence of Cleanth Brooks' concepts of irony and paradox, and this is evident in his first collection, The Broken Ground (1964). He taught English at New York University College in Bronx, before moving to the University of Kentucky, Lexington, where he taught creative writing from 1964 to 1977. Berry is recipient of several honors, including the T S Eliot award, the Aiken-Taylor award for poetry from Sewanee Review, and Cleanth Brooks award for lifetime achievement.

American Literature Journal, Wendell Berry, Environmental Protection, Kentuckian Nature, Post-modernist Experimentation, Didactic Tradition, Picturesque Evocations, Human Economy, Agricultural Practices, Economic System, Organic Gardening, Organic Farming.