Wendell Berry

From Wendell Berry's wonderful new book on poet William Carlos Williams:

"...the metaphor of the machine has grown upon us until it has ceased to be a metaphor and has become an equation or an identity, so that organisms, including our minds and the world itself, are now conventionally spoken of as machines, and this has helped to make us cold-hearted and destructive."

"When you are mindful of all that is involved in the making of a poem, schools of criticism and schools of composition, whatever their uses, will look small in the presence of poetry itself and of the good poems you know. The only equipment at all equal to those presences is the human mind, complete: imagination, intelligence, reason, instincts, senses, shared knowledge and loyalties, and the personal furniture of experience, memory, history, and culture. And insofar as that mind is conscious, it will be conscious of mysteries, of being baffled."

"As Williams saw, as anybody who looks can now see, it is precisely in their granting of priority to ideas over things and over the world that the universities have failed us, for that priority is established and maintained by the industrial technology that oppresses and exploits the material world and all its bodies."