In the following interview, Snyder discusses the influence of his past on his work and the evolution of his ideas on nature and Buddhism.

In the following excerpt, Martin uses feminist theory to analyze Snyder's complex metaphors.

In the following essay, Yamazato discusses the way in which Snyder's unique interpretation of Buddhism shapes his poetry.

In the essay below, Lavazzi documents the connection between Snyder's cosmology and his poetic structure.

In the following excerpt, Paul reveals correlations between personal events in Snyder's life and his development as both a poet and an environmentalist

In the following essay, Molesworth discusses the political and poetic viewpoints of Snyder's Pulitizer-prize-winning work, Turtle Island.

In the following review of The Practice of the Wild, McKibben argues that Snyder believes as environmentalists we must bridge our estrangement from nature.

In the following essay, Murphy analyzes Snyders' poem "Mountains and Rivers without End" in terms of Tzetvan Todorov's theories on the fantastic.

In the following essay, Almon explores the influence of Buddhist metaphysics on Snyder's work.

In the following excerpt, Vendler discusses the concept of self in Snyder's poetry.

In the following excerpt, Murphy discusses the ecological impact of Snyder's writing.

In the following essay, Lyon places Snyder's work at the forefront of the new naturalist movement.

In the essay below, Rehanek focuses on Axe Handles and considers Snyders' philosophy of the interconnections between man and nature.

In the following review, Benfey reconsiders Snyder's career from the 1950s to the present.

In the following excerpt, Martin explores Snyder's environmental writings and the ways in which Snyder challenges the dominant Western discourse.

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 articulation of a possible religious faith at a time when cultural alienation was pushing many people to experiment with various non-Western metaphysical systems. The reason for the latter is evident if one compares Snyder with other poets responding to the same quest for alternate religious doctrines. On the one hand there are poets like Cid Co...

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 years of exploitation have scattered around the Pacific Basin. RIPRAP is Snyder's first book. The title means "a cobble of stone laid on steep slick rock / to make a trail for horses in the mountains." In the last poem in the book he wrote of Poetry as a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics, the reality of perceived surface...

In the following excerpt, Schultz and Wyatt, summarize Snyder's early work and provide in-depth coverage of Axe Handles.

In the following essay, Bartlett discusses Snyder's translations of the works of seventh-century Buddhist poet Hanshan.

In the essay below, Yamazato traces Snyder's use of Japanese folktales and culture in his poetry.

[The essay from which this excerpt is taken was written as an introduction to The Real Work in August 1979.] In 1969 Gary Snyder published a collection of journal excerpts, reviews, translations, and essays under the title Earth House Hold. (p. xi)

In the following essay, Schork speculates on the influence of T. S. Eliot's poem "Preludes" on Snyder's "A Stone Garden."

In the following review of No Nature, Barber argues that Snyder's work has lost an element of vitality and urgency.

Snyder has recently mentioned that the direction of his future work after the completion of Mountains and Rivers Without End will be religious and philosophical. He has also stated that after that work has been completed, he may donate his books to the local library and retire to the anonymity of friends and family life in the mountains. This desire and such a life are, of course, in the true Oriental style. However, if Snyder ends his poetic career after this decade, it would even then be premature to make...

In the following excerpt, Lyon considers Snyder's poetry strongly rooted in the ecology of the American West.

Most striking [about the work of Gary Snyder] is the fact that he avoids metaphor of the kind … [wherein] two realms of conjunction, frequently one physical and the other spiritual, mix on the surface in such a way that the depths beneath will beckon, until any surface glancingly has something of depth in it. Contrary to this principle of steady sympathetic evocation, Snyder gives us only the surface and expects us not to expect it to ripple down to the depths beneath:    &#...

I have three ideas about Snyder's work as a whole that I want to bring up. First, his is essentially a Western imagination. His poems are powerfully located—sown, rooted—in the landscape of the far Western states. He is a Western writer just as, for example, Delmore Schwartz, Anthony Hecht, and Howard Moss are Eastern writers…. These two sets of writers deal with different geographical landscapes but the distinction is deeper and subtler than that. They differ in what might be ca...

["True insight"] to Snyder is "a love-making hovering between the void & the immense worlds of creation,"… and poetry, as its subtlest medium of expression, walks "that edge between what can be said and that which cannot be said … [I]t's going out into emptiness and into the formless" while at the same time resting on "an absolute foundation of human experience and insight."… The "pure inspiration flow" bri...

[Hannah] Arendt's main point [in The Human Condition, her critical reassessment of the main tradition of European political philosophy,] is that the modern world is most hampered by its elevation of action over contemplation, with the concomitant devaluation of thought itself within the realm of action. To restore to political vision the awareness of the value and necessity of thought, not only as a form of activity but also as its most fully human form: this is Arendt's central project, and i...

[Axe Handles is] Snyder's first book of poems in almost ten years…. How have the years treated Snyder? Pretty well, I'd say. Despite a few limp efforts (included are throwaway poems about Jerry Brown's visits to Snyder's yurt, nature and trivia, and Snyder's role on the California Arts Council), some of these poems rank with Snyder's best. There is a quieter, mellower tone throughout than we find in much of the earlier work; and he now writes of what he scrut...

In the following review of Turtle Island, Leibowitz argues that Snyder has failed to adequately transform stray thoughts into powerful poetry.

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 names" which characterizes the way we readers respond to our poets; he does so because he writes out of a tradition of self-effacement, and his yearnings are for a communal poetry rooted in place. But without a "name," poets aren't asked to do interviews, and without a big name such interviews are never collected in...

In the following excerpt, Tillinghast praises No Nature for uniting a lifetime of Snyder's work.

In the excerpt below, Norton discusses Snyder's use of imagery.

In the following review, Strickland praises Snyder's wisdom and attention to craftsmanship in the essays from The Practice of the Wild.

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 work has a social purpose to it that makes his comments about all matters valuable. And besides, Snyder possesses a keen inelligence about a tremendous range of subjects. Accordingly, the fourteen interviews in The Real Work don't have the totally literary tang to them that an academic writer might create in such talks. They present...

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 the continent, based on many creation myths [in which the earth is seen as resting on a turtle's back] of the people who have been living here for millennia, and reapplied by some of them to 'North America' in recent years." Like Turtle Island, Axe Handles is about North America, in particular about the underpop...

Gary Snyder comes to The Real Work having accomplished some very real work himself…. The titles of these interviews hint at some of the directions his work has taken. From "Landscape of Consciousness" through "The Zen of Humanity" and "Tracking Down the Natural Man," on to "The Bioregional Ethic," these talks with Snyder form the author's first non-poetry collection since Earth House Hold (1969).

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 in [The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964–1979] show his usual wit and concision. He talks better than most people write. Anyone who wants to know how Snyder's thinking on social and literary issues has evolved since Earth House Hold in 1969 will find much to mull over. The six pieces collected in The Old Ways (1977) were...

[He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village] is Gary Snyder's senior thesis done at Reed College, from which he was graduated in 1951 with a dual major in anthropology and English. It is, in a way, a model of all his subsequent work, because it attempts to lead through literature—in this case, a "Swan Maiden" myth among the Haida tribe—to the living roots of cultural practice and psychology. By itself, it is an impressive study, bringing the theories of Graves, Fre...

[Gary Snyder] occasionally makes his ideas too obvious. His new collection, Axe Handles, ends with a painfully clear commitment to North American ecology: "I pledge allegiance to the soil / of Turtle Island, / one ecosystem / in diversity / under the sun / With joyful interpenetration for all." The new book hops along the ground instead of flying in the upper ether of Buddhist poetry. A good many poems are relatively disconnected I-do-this-I-do-that Zen diaries, which get wearisome. But in oth...