Literary Speaking
David Whyte’s work initially found its way into the world outside of the normal and traditional channels available to poets. Until the last few years, he was unknown in the University English Department or small literary magazines where poets often make their start. His ability to memorize poetry, his own and others, and bring it to bear on the questions that compel human beings made him as much a philosopher as a literary figure. After being invited into the organizational world, where he used poetry to bring a new understanding of conversational leadership, he was even harder to categorize in the literary world.
And yet his poetry has always stood independent of any context in which he has worked, with a readership looking at the poetry for its own sake. For example, despite having spoken on the issue for over twenty years, he has almost no poetry directly written about the workplace. His work looks at the larger, timeless relationship of human beings to their world, to their relationship with creation, with others or with death. He looks at the sufferings and joys that come with revelations and the necessities of belonging to specific families, peoples and places. His work also chronicles a close relationship to landscapes and histories, especially those of his native Yorkshire, Ireland, Wales and his more recent home in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
David Whyte's steadily burgeoning readership, and especially listener-ship, grew organically in almost all corners of the globe until it finally created a critical mass of recognition. In the last few years he has begun to appear at literary gatherings in the US and the UK such as the Oxford, Ledbury and Ojai poetry festivals and his poetry is beginning to be spoken of in the same breath as other major contemporary, Irish American and English poets.
