Luminary Poets of the Berkshires

Break up a thick clod of poetry, from the poets who have known life in the Berkshires, and you’ll find roots old as language, dense and tenacious as Mount Greylock, sinuous and fluid as the Housatonic River, mutable as the four seasons.

Here is Berkshire pilgrim Nathaniel Hawthorne, as Henry James described him (in Hawthorne, published in 1879): “late-coming fruit of a tree which might seem to have lost the power to bloom… His forefathers had crossed the Atlantic for conscience’ sake, and it was the idea of the urgent conscience that haunted (his) imagination…”

Hawthorne’s knowledge of his ancestor’s role in the Salem witch trials was a compelling force in the fulfillment of his lay, literary vocation. Poems, novels, and tales nourish the steady stream of civilization at least as much as do the sermons of sectarian, religious covenants.

Poetry is a conversation that informs people, flowing parallel to religious liturgy and dogma. Whereas religion is subject to strict regulation by an ordained clergy, poetry is lorded over by the Immortal Muse, and, like Melville’s leviathan, supports barnacles from the academy, the marketplace, and government.

Hawthorne’s eighteen month refuge in the Berkshires, 1850-51, came on the heels of his losing a political patronage job in Salem. Such happenstance led to his friendship with Berkshireite Herman Melville, which needed the additional circumstance of a sudden cloudburst to unite them under a ledge near the summit of Monument Mountain.

Hawthorne so impressed Melville that he immediately read Hawthorne’s four-year-old Mosses From an Old Manse, then published, pseudonymously, a review of it that is among the best literary criticism ever written (Hawthorne and His Mosses). More importantly, the meeting impelled him re-organize and revise his novel-in-progress, Moby-Dick, which he dedicated to Hawthorne upon publication a year later.

And so we see how hallowed are the Berkshires, the veritable Holy Land of American Letters.