SOURCE: "American Zen: Gary Snyder's No Nature," in Soul Says: On Recent Poetry, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 117-29.

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

Gary Snyder is more widely known as an ecological activist than as a poet, and indeed the jacket copy on his No Nature: New and Selected Poems makes a heavy-handed pitch to the ecologically minded sector of his audience: "We are a people, as this century ends, desperate to recapture the feeling of being at home in the world. No Nature offers us guidance along this path. Snyder's poems invite us to observe nature carefully, and to see ecology, bioregionalism, and sustainable culture as intrinsically bound to our own human fate." This offers us Snyder as guru, and it is a role he has not avoided. "My political position," he has written, "is...