Shanna 4/30/08 The Beautifully Authentic in Berry and Lewis

Poets are often characterized as dreamers, unrealistc, or even "Bohemian." This could be true, but poets are also in touch with their surroundings. They attempt to find deeper meaning in the ordinary, and beauty in the natural. It could be said that poets are spiritual people. Wendell Berry in A Continuous Harmony, when describing nature poets, applies "the presence of mystery or divinity in the world, or even to the attitudes of wonder or awe or humility before the works of creation" (Berry, 3). I think it is safe to say that most poets usually love the natural world. From my own perspective, I write poetry, and I enjoy nature. Poets do have a tendency to only use the bright and sunny side of nature, the parts they find beautiful. According to C.S. Lewis in Likings and Loves for the Subhuman, these poets "lose what really matters--the moods of time and season, the spirit of the place" (Lewis, 18). But nature poets, on the other hand, do not have a problem with this distraction. They wish to poeticize all aspects of nature, so to say, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Berry includes the words of Denise Levertov, "a religious devotion to the truth, to the splendor of the authentic..." (Berry, 2). To be authentic, a poet must record the organic, the untampered with, the natural, without regard to what emotion they wish to express, or uncover in their readers. Nature poets, therefore, cannot add or take away, or embellish, or detract. What is seen must be put into words. What is felt must not get in the way of their poetry.