Standing by Words: Essays

by Wendell Berry

“If we fail to do what is required and if we do what is forbidden, we exclude ourselves from the mercy of Nature; we destroy our place, or we are exiled from it.”

The essays of Wendell Berry are an extended conversation about the life he values; sustainable agriculture, a connection to place, the miracle of life, and the interconnectedness of all things. The existence of this life is dependent on our devotion to preserving it, an emotional proximity to the land that is slipping away from us.

In six elegant, linked literary essays, Berry considers the degeneration of language that is manifest throughout our culture, from poetry to politics, from conversation to advertising, and he shows how the ever-widening cleft between the words and their referents mirrors the increasing isolation of individuals and their communities from the land. With his confident and unwavering prose, Berry assesses how the gap between modern communities and nature grew so large, how we may bridge it, and the role language plays in facilitating both parts.

Standing by Words joins our new series, which celebrates the collected essays of Wendell Berry in beautiful, uniform editions.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Poetry, Writing, Philosophy, Cultural, Education

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Wendell Berry is a conservationist, farmer, essayist, novelist, professor of English and poet. He was born August 5, 1934 in Henry County, Kentucky where he now lives on a farm. The New York Times has called Berry the "prophet of rural America."

Reviews

[Fionnuala]

Wendell Berry's essay, 'Standing by Words' was written in 1979 and concerns the disintegration of language which Berry claims has been happening now for more than one hundred and fifty years. During that period he believes there has been 'a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning'. He makes an eloquent argument for the upholding of standards. He says, "In order for a statement to be complete and comprehensible three conditions are required:
1. It must designate its object precisely.
2. Its speaker must stand by it: must believe it; be accountable for it, be willing to act on it.
3. This relation of speaker, word, and object must be conventional; the community must know what it is."
This is what Berry calls the 'accountability' of language. What would he make of twitter speak, I wonder?

[Meghan Armstrong · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the whole book, but my 5 stars go to the last essay “Poetry and Place,” which is basically the second half of the book.

Ever since I read “The Book of Camp Branch,” one of Berry’s Sabbath poems, I’ve had an inkling of what *Standing By Words* must be about and what the title must mean (also 5 stars for the title alone). He delivered and then some.

This book astonished me, challenged me, made me think about my place and my body and the work I do with my hands, even prompted me to try to write a sonnet —I’ll be different because of it. I don’t want it to be over.

It’s not an easy read by any means, but I’ve read almost none of the poetry that Berry references, and I was still able to follow it.

It made me chomp at the bit to read more poetry. Pope and Pound have been added to my list, and I’m all the more eager to get to *Paradise Lost* and *The Faerie Queene.* I’ll approach Wordsworth (via Charlotte Mason) with a bit more caution. Who knows if I’ll ever condescend to read Shelley; Berry just eviscerates him (but with great decorum).

Everybody thinks Wendell Berry is mainly a tree-hugger. He sure does love his trees, but read this book for a defense of the Order of Creation. You will love the Maker and His creatures more for having read it.

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am blown away with this book which was a struggle to get through. The last essay Poetry and Place (100+ pages) wove together and compared poetry some of which I was familiar (Dante and Wordsworth) with those I was not (Milton, Pope, Dryden, etc.). While I was unfamiliar with many of the poets and their works, Berry was able to draw out his points with examples that convinced me that I may have to rethink my assessment of Wordsworth and my simplistic means of classifying poetic movements.

It is a difficult read, but I can say it was enjoyable as reading Lewis and Chesterton is enjoyable. They lead you down a dark hallway of examples to emerge into a bright courtyard of helpful distinctions and new categories.

[Bob Brinkmeyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most noteworthy aspects of Wendell Berry’s writing—his novels, poetry, and essays—is the vision of community life that nurtures and binds together its individuals, land, and animals. This vision is everywhere present in this collection of essays, even though they are first and foremost literary, exploring topics such as the nature of poetic inspiration, the cultural work of poetry, and the writers that Berry finds most meaningful and inspiring (Shakespeare, Dante, Whitman, Dryden [yes, that’s right!], among others) and those he finds most limiting and troubling (Shelley comes under particular and sustained attack). Throughout the essays, Berry makes a call for what he deems the “disciplined imagination,” an imagination that rather than turning inward to focus entirely on the isolated mind (what Berry finds in much Romantic and modern writing) instead attempts to balance interior with exterior, grounding itself thoroughly in place and being concerned with relation, dependence, propriety, proportion, and balance (you can see why he doesn’t like Shelley). Structuring Berry’s vision of harmony and wholeness are a set of fundamental analogies that appear not only in these essays but also in his entire work—such as that between marriage and farming, cultural change and biology, and imagination and the natural world. For me, the highlight of this brilliant book was his discussion of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, including his citation of lines in which the Duke comments on his exiled life in the forest, lines that in some ways point to Berry’s own vision: “And this our life, exempt from public haunt, / Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything.” What these lines leave out about Berry is that throughout his career he has never stood “exempt from public haunt,” but instead has sought to create an art and a way of life that stand against the political and industrial terrors that now reign.

[Ian Caveny · Rating 5 out of 5]

At this juncture, I feel like I have become pretty familiar with Wendell Berry and his wide variety of skills. The man writes poetry, he farms, he critiques globalism and corporatism, he tells stories. These I have become fairly familiar with over the course of three-four months of rapacious reading. I feel like I have just experienced a graduate-level course in "The Thought of Wendell Berry"... and yet I still was not ready for the intelligent, savvy, powerful literary criticism discourse of Standing by Words.

To be sure, this collection of essays is no parallel in prowess to Berry's other masterworks; it lacks the sublimity of his poetry and the imagery of his prose. But, then again, literary criticism, despite what some of its proponents may think, is just not "sexy." It is an informative and critical art, and attempts to make literary criticism more artistic lead either to the perverse cycles of self-indulgence found in the Aestheticism movement (see Walter Pater's The Renaissance) or self-critical, meta-reflexive art that mock the genre (like postmodern literary master, Mark Z. Danielewski) without accomplishing its ends. Berry's commitment to an old-school of literary criticism serves him well.

Berry's unique ability to bring everything back to agrarianism is always surprising, and the standout final essay, "Poetry and Place," manages to do so by simultaneously honoring the work of Alexander Pope (to the surprise of many) and the dismantling of the work of Percy B. Shelley (to the surprise of absolutely no one). This re-reading of British Romanticism as against an "old order" of hierarchized nature is illuminating and valuable, especially since the current academic climate, which feels anemic toward Shelley and Wordsworth, is long overdue for an ecological overhaul when it comes to "dangerous terms" like "hierarchy" or "authority."

The essays here do a particular powerful work of asserting the goodness of particularized language, and claiming that generalized and de-particularized language is actually a social ill. This is powerful medicine, if received well. Altogether, I find Berry to be a stalwart proponent of something that we may call "pre-modernism"; and his rejection of both the modernist-industrialist West and of post-modernism's tendency towards the relative is refreshingly prophetic.

[Scott Bielinski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Per usual, Berry's insights are stimulating and welcome. I especially enjoyed this collection of essays as they demonstrate Berry's exceptional grasp of the English literary tradition and how it stands as a buttress against the cultural, economic, and spiritual forces that separate us from the land and one another. "Poetry and Place," in particular was a wonderful (though meandering, at points) essay on how poets/poetry serve and stimulate our ability to imagine our place in the cosmos. He has a beautiful line about Dante, referencing his failure to articulate the Light Supreme: "but the awesomeness and power of which are borne into the imaginative life of the poem by the very failure of speech and memory. The triumph of the poem, finally, is that the unspeakable is rendered . . . by speechlessness, by the inability to present what has been revealed" (120). Poetry, especially in Dante, reminds us of our limits, even as we ascend to greater (spiritual) heights. Poetry reminds us of the goodness of creation and rehabilitates our imagination such that we can see more clearly how we are to live in it.

As a bonus, Berry's argument that the Romantic movement was by no means a movement toward nature, but the interposition of the ego between creation and the human is brilliant. Far too many see the Romantic movement as a mere response to the rationalism of the Enlightenment. I love the Romantic poets, but there are legitimately sinister and, frankly, autocratic elements in their poetry. Typified in Percy Shelley's "compulsive" spiritualizing (174) of creation, the Romantic movement does not sit easily alongside a genuine love of nature, for it uses nature for all-too-human ends (this is something Nietzsche saw in Romanticism, too). Berry rightly points out that Shelley's views parallel the forms of Christianity that he so despised (though I would want to stress that Shelley's issues were with cultural forms of Christianity, not Christianity per se, though this distinction is elided in his own work).

[Reagan · Rating 4 out of 5]

These essays have helped guide my thoughts and actions regarding poetry. One major idea he points out is the baggage that Romanticism brings to poetry, specifically it's inability to talk about an object in any meaningful way. Because of this, he writes to demonstrate that words are supposed to express real things to real people. As I am finding out with Berry, human responsibility always has a place in his understanding of what should and should not be done and these essays reflect his thoughts on how words should be used. My biggest takeaway from the essays was that writing meaningful poetry means knowing who you are writing for before starting. This was one of my favorite quotes, "Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous" 61. This review would be five stars except I wanted the last essay to be split into several more directed essays.

[Cindy Rollins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I struggled with how many stars to give this. At times it was rough going. There were 5-star paragraphs throughout the book but it was not as easy to read as say, C.S. Lewis-a 5-star author.

I might even have given it 3 stars had it not ended with a discussion of As You Like It. I spent the entire last chapter thinking,"As You Like It?" I felt quite vindicated by Berry's agreement.

[Melody Schwarting · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wendell Berry at his Berriest, with a dose of early modern poetry for good measure.

[Hannah Sparks · Rating 3 out of 5]

sorry sweetie I love farming but I am a provincial bimbo I cannot read critical theory.

[Patti · Rating 3 out of 5]

I admit I got bogged down in several of the essays and skipped through them. When I settled down and dug in, the words and ideas resonated as they always do when reading Wendell Berry. The essays I most connected to were "People, Land and Community" and "Poetry and Marriage".

There is a paragraph in the essay "The Specialization of Poetry" that strongly speaks to our times.
"Contemporaneity, in the sense of being 'up with the times,' is of no value. Wakefulness to experience - as well as to instruction and example - is another matter. But what we call the modern world is not necessarily, and not often the real world, and there is no virtue in being up-to-date in it. It is a false world, based upon economies and values and desires that are fantastical-a world in which millions of people have lost any idea of the materials, the disciplines, the restraints, and the work necessary to support human life, and have thus become dangerous to their own lives and to the possibility of life. The job now is to get back to that perennial and substantial world in which we really do live, in which the foundations of our life will be visible to us, and in which we can accept our responsibilities again within the conditions of necessity and mystery. In that world all wakeful and responsible people, dead, living, and unborn, are contemporaries. And that is the only contemporaneity worth having."

The false world has not improved in the 29 years since this essay was written.

[Kelly Dean Jolley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth 5 stars for the title essay alone.

[Patrick Walsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

These essays present us with Wendell Berry as prophet and philosopher and speak clearly to our age even though they were written over forty years ago. We are at a point when, because of the social, political, environmental, and political chaos that surrounds us, many of us don’t know what to do or where to go. Wendell Berry offers these words:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

(From the essay “Poetry and Marriage” on page 97)

[Caleb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the first two essays, including the title essay, and the final essay about poetry and marriage. Having read several other collections from Berry, it didn't feel necessary to read the other three in this collection because the themes are familiar. The essays that I did read, however, are holistic and often wise responses to hyper-individualism and the knee-jerk rejection of form and tradition. As usual, Berry is at his best when he shows how creativity, communities, and individual selves need constraints to flourish.

[Tamara Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my goodness, I loved this book. I littered these pages with book darts and dog-eared pages. As much as I want to resist the contrarian Wendell Berry, he continues to inspire, teach, and compel me toward deeper truths about the interconnectedness of the earth, culture, and social relationships. The fact that he does this in the context of the way we use and appreciate language hits a bulls-eye for my need to think, feel, and physically engage with the world around me.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very chewy, especially in contrast to his fiction. I read the title essay, was challenged and inspired by it, but only dipped into other essays. My impression was that they were often variations and specific applications of the themes laid out in “Standing by Words,” but there was more going on. I guess I I felt “I was good”— like when you have a a great meal, but feel no need to eat it all. You are replete.

[Ron at Rockhaven · Rating 4 out of 5]

always timely but especially the titular essay Standing by Words in this time of truthiness and alternative facts and loss of the particular and the selfishness of projecting a future in technology that is divorced from the promises we should be building with one another for a future of real community. And the essay Land, People, Community which is as good a summary of all his works in their multiple genres as you will find. Know your place. Love it. That will grow the good life.

[Jessi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a difficult read for me (see that it took me nearly three months to finish). I think I agree with a lot of Berry's core arguments, but there were some things that provoked a "hm" response from me. Very dense at parts, and I wasn't the biggest fan of the final essay (though that may be because I skimmed it). I'm going to have to reread a lot of this and read some more of the poets he references throughout.

[Mar · Rating 3 out of 5]

2-3 for me. Berry's points are decent, but dated today. The collection of essays was initially published in 1983 and he speaks of the loss of language, of poetry losing its regimented style and structure and attention to words amongst other things. Unfortunately, I'm not sure his concern nor his analysis of Milton, Shakespeare, and Chaucer resonates with the average person anymore.

[Sarah Gantsoudes · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Poetry and Marriage" is this critical work's stand-out essay, and the best distillation of Berry's larger complaint about the degradation of language, community, and our relationship to the land.

Standing by Words has a lot to admire, not least of all its adherence to Berry's advised precision of form. But these staunch, premodernist essays—published, incredibly, in 1983—have aged strangely. Reading in 2020, I struggled to find reasonable applicability to the way we live and communicate today. No doubt this only confirms the realization of Berry's fears. True millennial metamodernist that I am, I'm not convinced that the mutability of language (spoken, written, texted, tweeted) is all bad, especially where the lives and expression of non-white, non-male, non-academics are concerned. On the one hand, Berry's concerns were prescient. On the other, his insistence upon limits may be its own blind spot.

I was surprised to learn that Berry is still living (and then I was momentarily pained to imagine someone of his sensibilities walking the earth concurrent with Trump). In this era, my fellow millennial metamodernists in journalism seem to want to turn him into a bonafide folk hero, spokesperson for old-guard conservation, and upstanding ambassador of rural America. Some of this feels smarmy, and yet here I am. Having only just begun to explore Berry's prolific contributions to environmentalism, activism, and writing, I stand to clarify my own impressions of his work, and I certainly stand to learn from it.

[A M · Rating 3 out of 5]

On basis of enjoying Berry alone, I can’t say I /enjoyed/ this one. For whatever reason it was very difficult for me to digest the dense poetry analysis and I found it difficult to even follow or understand what the point of what some of the passages were saying. But i’m chocking that up to me needing to challenge my brain to understand abstracted concepts more.

[Neil · Rating 3 out of 5]

I agree with Berry's central premise here that language is more often compromised in recent years by misuse, but I feel it was a mistake to start here with his nonfiction. It was more technical and dry than I expected and not style of writing that I appreciate as I've drifted away from academia over the years. I think I will stick with his novels in the future.

[Cheryl]

Because Montaigne in Barn Boots: An Amateur Ambles Through Philosophy...

[Ron · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed all of the essays in this book but the last one - Poetry and Place. If you're a fan oof Wendell Berry (as I am), I'm sure you'll love the first 5 essays. I'll leave it up to you to decide on the 6th one.

[Clayton Lovell · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most influential essay collections I've ever read. For anyone interested in American culture, agriculture, poetry, marriage, and linguistics, Berry whisks these seemingly disparate topics into a smooth batter with surprising ease.

[Cameron Barham]

“The idea of standing by one’s words, of words precisely designating things, of deeds faithful to words, is probably native to our understanding. Indeed, it seems doubtful that we could understand anything without that idea.”, p. 31

[Jordan Kinsey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Berry at his most dense.

[Elana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay, I didn't really finish it. Some good ideas but waaaay to dense.

[Courtney Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazingly rich collection of essays on the importance of language.

[Cathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a challenging read, but the final essay (Poetry and Marriage) made it all worthwhile.