Luminary Poets of the Berkshires celebrates the legacy of poets who have resided in (or very near) the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. Two hundred fifty years after the establishment of the American republic seems a good time to recall the visionaries whose poetry illuminates both the era and the area.
We presume these poets to have composed their work under the influence of the stunning natural environment, even when the poem betrays no outdoors or woodsy mountain imagery. What matters is that they wrote here, or were close neighbors. (There is much cyberspace already devoted to Living Poets of the Berkshires!)
The whole of nature, of course, is our common inheritance, and it is the wonderful way Nature tantalizes the mind of a poet that decided us to reach just beyond the county line to include Edward Taylor of Westfield. Although writing in the same century as Shakespeare did, he sounds hyper-modern when he wonders, in The Preface to his long serial poem God’s Determination touching his Elect:
“Who in this bowling alley bowled the sun?”
This isn’t a scholastic expedition into the minds of these poets; we do not attempt to theorize, for example, what may have impelled William Cullen Bryant to compose Monument Mountain. Let’s content ourselves with a discussion of the poets and the landscape we share in common with them.