Gary Snyder Summary

Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco, California. He has married three times, the first two marriages ending in divorce. In 1950 he married Alison Gass and was divorced in 1951; in 1960 he married Jo... Read more

As Wendell Berry writes in his contribution to Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life (1991), "One thing that distinguishes Gary Snyder among his literary contemporaries is his willingness to address himse... Read more

Gary Snyder is one of the most significant American environmental writers of the twentieth century and a central figure in American environmental activism. Through his intelligent and provocative writ... Read more

In the following excerpt, Lyon considers Snyder's poetry strongly rooted in the ecology of the American West. The limitations of White/Western thought have also been limned, for serious Western... Read more

In the following excerpt, Paul reveals correlations between personal events in Snyder's life and his development as both a poet and an environmentalist I know of no one since Thoreau who has so... Read more

In the following essay, Molesworth discusses the political and poetic viewpoints of Snyder's Pulitizer-prize-winning work, Turtle Island. We can take Snyder's Turtle Island as the most c... Read more

In the excerpt below, Norton discusses Snyder's use of imagery. In his early wilderness poetry, Gary Snyder builds absences into the structure, imagery, and syntax of his texts in order to insc... Read more

In the following interview, Snyder discusses the influence of his past on his work and the evolution of his ideas on nature and Buddhism. [Martin]: I'd like to start by talking about origins an... Read more

In the following essay, Lyon places Snyder's work at the forefront of the new naturalist movement. There are some positive signs—more than straws in the wind—that a significant nu... Read more

In the following essay, Yamazato discusses the way in which Snyder's unique interpretation of Buddhism shapes his poetry. For Gary Snyder, Buddhism was and is not merely a system of faith and w... Read more

In the following excerpt, Tillinghast praises No Nature for uniting a lifetime of Snyder's work. Only in our age could a poem have been written that gives an account of life in California... Read more

In the following review, Benfey reconsiders Snyder's career from the 1950s to the present. Gary Snyder was a character in a novel before he published his own first book. In Jack Kerouac'... Read more

In the following essay, Bartlett discusses Snyder's translations of the works of seventh-century Buddhist poet Hanshan. Kenneth Rexroth, whose fourteen books of translations include many poems ... Read more

In the following essay, Murphy analyzes Snyders' poem "Mountains and Rivers without End" in terms of Tzetvan Todorov's theories on the fantastic. Critics of the Fantastic t... Read more

In the essay below, Lavazzi documents the connection between Snyder's cosmology and his poetic structure. It would be best to consider this a continuing "revolution of consciousness�... Read more

In the following review of The Practice of the Wild, McKibben argues that Snyder believes as environmentalists we must bridge our estrangement from nature. We talk in a lazy shorthand when we speak ab... Read more

Critical Essay by Roger Jones Of all poets who have published [books of interviews], Gary Snyder's interviews seem to be most organically harmonious with his poetic practice as a whole, for his... Read more

Critical Essay by Charles Molesworth [Hannah] Arendt's main point [in The Human Condition, her critical reassessment of the main tradition of European political philosophy,] is that the modern ... Read more

Critical Essay by Thomas Parkinson Snyder is not interested in fad, fashion, or convention: he is interested in tradition, and he is concerned with constructing a valid culture from the debris that ye... Read more

Critical Essay by Bruce Bawer Gary Snyder's last book was his Pulitzer prize-winning Turtle Island (1974), whose title, as he explained in an introductory note, was "the old/new name for... Read more

Critical Essay by Ekbert Faas ["True insight"] to Snyder is "a love-making hovering between the void & the immense worlds of creation,"… and poetry, as its subtl... Read more

Critical Essay by Charles Altieri Gary Snyder is one of the very few poets since 1900 to command both a large popular appeal and considerable respect from his peers. The reason for the former is his a... Read more

Critical Essay by Kevin Oderman In an aside to one of his other remarks [in The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964–1979], Gary Snyder implicitly criticizes the "stress on individual n... Read more

Critical Essay by Bert Almon The tape recorder often gives us wordy ramblings of egocentric writers. Fortunately Gary Snyder is neither wordy nor egocentric, and the interviews and lectures collected ... Read more