Snyder, Gary [Sherman]
Snyder, Gary [Sherman]( 1930– ),San Francisco-born poet, reared on a Washington farm and in Portland, after graduation from Reed College, work in the Forest Service, and study of Oriental languages at the University of California, Berkeley, participated in the local poetic renaissance that featured the Beat movement. He was later a tanker seaman and lived in Japan to take formal Zen training until he settled on a northern California farm. He has said, “I hold the most archaic values …the fertility of the soul, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, …the common work of the tribe” in his sacramental view of man's relation to the universe. His poems appear in Riprap (1959), based on his experiences in the woods and at sea; Myths and Texts (1960), a series unified by the themes of the failure of Western culture and the contrasting values of Buddhism and American Indian primitivism (enlarged in 1965 with Cold...
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