Gary Snyder wrote most of the poems inTurtle Island in the late 1960s and early 1970s when he returned to the United States from his 12-year hiatus in Japan. The influence of Far Eastern culture and Zen Buddhism on his work is clear in many poems, including "Anasazi," but considering the similarity of Native American philosophy to Zen, we cannot always tell where references to one end and the other begin. Fundamentally, it makes little difference, for these poems were written in a time of large-scale revolution in American thought, politics, and behavior, much of it leaning toward - if not completely enveloping - the same sentiments and ideas that Snyder had been promoting for decades. A sampling of only the titles of the journals in which many ofTurtle Island's poems first appeared is indicative of.....
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