Snyder, Gary (Vol. 5) - Snyder, Gary 1930–
Snyder, Gary 1930–
Snyder, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet associated with the San Francisco Renaissance, spent nearly ten years as a novice and student of Zen in a Japanese monastery. That experience, like his work as a logger, forester, carpenter, and seaman, is close to the heart of his accomplished poetry of innocence and primal ritual. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 17-18.)
Once he has announced his occupational skills as logging, forestry, carpentry and seamanship, it is not surprising that Gary Snyder, who says that as a poet he holds "the most archaic values on earth," should have left this country where the forests have been stripped or burned off, where "the crews have departed," for the interior exile of Japanese monasteries and the rapturous life of a cosmic bum…. It is a departure from a world of fragments…. (p. 487)
It is perhaps his very aspiration to an illuminated existence within what other...
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