"Our agriculture is wrongly based. It is a system largely directed
at curing evils which it itself is responsible for. It is the
wisdom of the country and the traditional farmers we need now; the
wisdom of those who have built up long-lasting agriculture and
whose wisdom lies in tradition. They have fashioned it through
physical work and close and immediate observation; through the
personal intimacy with nature which we have come to associate with
the poet. In fact, peasant life is poetic, and it is so precisely
because of this intimacy. The music, dance and art of peasants are
the creative expression of their lives, and as such are
characteristic of their environments and the land on which they
live. Nothing collective or traditional, as peasant life is,
originates from people separated from the soil, as are townfolk.
The poems and essays that played a notable part in the country life
of the Chinese, the Tibetan art which finds its way into every
home, the sylvan setting of Japanese villages, of the Balinese and
Burmese, the vocal harmony of Swiss peasants returning from their
fields, the reproduction of floral beauty and colour in festive
dress of so many countries; these are the product of the poet that
lies in every peasant's heart. It is this intimacy that inspires
creativity in the poet, as the Greeks recognized in their choice of
word for poet, namely, a 'maker' or creator, and which Dante voiced
in the Divine Comedy, when he wrote that the poet was not the
disciple of the imagination, but rather one who knows the secrets
of nature." - Guy Wrench Dr Wrench takes us on a wide-ranging
journey through the history of some of the world's most important
civilizations, concentrating on the relationship between humanity
and the soil. He shows the reader how farming practices, and the
care - or lack of care - with which the soil is treated have
brought about both the rise and fall of civilizations, from the
ancient Romans, to the Chinese, and the Muslim world. This is a
fully re-edited version of this classic and fundamentally important
text.
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