Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American poet (often associated with the Beat Generation); and an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist who is frequently described as the 'laureate of Deep Ecology — roles reflecting his studies of both Buddhist spirituality and nature. As a social critic, Snyder's views share something in common with Lewis Mumford, Aldous Huxley, Karl Hess, Aldo Leopold, and Karl Polanyi.

Later life and writings

Regarding Wave, a stylistic departure offering poems that were more emotional, metaphoric, and lyrical appeared in 1969. In the late 1960s and after, the content of Snyder's poetry increasingly has to do with family, friends, and community. He continued to publish poetry throughout the 1970s, much of it reflecting his re-immersion in life on the American continent and his involvement in the re-inhabitation (or back to the land) movement in the Sierra foothills. His 1974 book Turtle Island, named for the aboriginal name for the North American continent, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Related Topics:
Back to the land - 1974 - Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

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He also wrote a number of essays outlining his views on poetry, culture, social experimentation, and the environment. Many of these were collected in Earth House Hold (1969), The Old Ways (1977), The Real Work (1980), The Practice of the Wild (1990), A Place in Space (1995), and The Gary Snyder Reader (1999). In 1979, Snyder published He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth, based on his Reed thesis. Snyder's journals from his travel in India in the mid 1960s appeared in 1983 under the title Passage Through India.

Related Topics:
1969 - 1977 - 1980 - 1990 - 1995 - 1999 - 1979

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In interviews and in articles about him, Snyder provided much food for thought, starting back in the mid 1960s. In these, his wide-ranging interests in cultures, natural history, religions, social critique, contemporary America, and hands-on aspects of rural life, as well as his ideas on literature, were given full-blown articulation. In the 1980s and ?90s, he expressed a lot of these sorts of ideas in public lectures and in essays, including ones published in major outdoor and environmental magazines (and later collected in books).

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In 1985, Snyder became a professor in the writing program at the University of California, Davis. Here he began to influence a new generation of authors interested in writing about the Far East, including novelist Robert Clark Young.

Related Topics:
1985 - University of California, Davis - Robert Clark Young

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As Snyder's involvement in environmental issues and his teaching grew, he seemed to move away from poetry for much of the 1980s and early 1990s. However, in 1996 he published the complete Mountains and Rivers Without End, which, in its mixture of the lyrical and epic modes celebrating the act of inhabitation on a specific place on the planet, is both his finest work and a summation of what a re-inhabitory poetic stands for. This work was written over a 40-year period. It has been translated into Japanese and French. In 2004 Snyder published Danger on Peaks, his first collection of new poems in twenty years.

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Along the way, Gary Snyder was awarded the Levinson Prize from Poetry journal, the American Poetry Society Shelley Memorial Award (1986), was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1987), and won the 1997 Bolingen Prize for Poetry.

Related Topics:
1986 - American Academy of Arts and Letters - 1987

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