Snyder, Gary 1930–

An American poet in the Beat-Buddhist tradition, Snyder is the author of Riprap and Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 17-18.)

The poetry of Gary Snyder is monotonous, flat and superficial, and probably for those reasons is much esteemed by a variety of people, most of them very young. He is even admired by a few intelligent critics like Professor Thomas Parkinson of Berkeley….

I do not doubt that a number of Snyder's texts are treasured as sacred books, but precisely by those who do not care, at least about poetry as an art form. Snyder's most recent, and best publicized volume tells us all we need to know about his poetry, and the concerns of his disciples. The Back Country is a collection of generally brief lyrics covering Snyder's characteristic themes, and written over a period of roughly fifteen years. Reflected in these poems are Snyder's love of the West Coast, especially the rugged mountain country where, presumably, a man can be a man and smoke Marlboro and learn all about woodlore…. More important, though, is Snyder's long familiarity with the Orient, and his consequent love of all things orientally exotic, including Japanese place-names, family names and the names of dishes most Americans will not recognize. Predictably, Snyder's things and places are for him simply guideposts in what the poet obviously considers a vast spiritual journey, one that is to permit him to engage and transcend the realities of civilization and evoke the superiority of wilderness and humble orient. The trouble is that Snyder never really shows us why the one ought to be recommended over the other—the contexts in which sensations and impressions are evoked are patently unreal and unelaborated, in the nature of still-life water colors or "washes." All one can think of when thinking back on a Snyder poem is a blur of pine trees, lazy grasses and faint sounds of bells and chants and bird cries emanating from temples and the reaches of the night….

Snyder's commitments, while very likely sincere, are grossly superficial, and his evocations of them at best programmistic and facile. His poetry can be appealing only to those who know what to expect and are prepared to read the poetry in such a way that it will support those vague and formless projects that are their lives.

Robert Boyers, in Partisan Review (copyright © 1969 by Partisan Review, Inc.), No. 2, 1969, pp. 311-13.

[Snyder] searches and finds value in earth and man….

Regarding Wave is a tactile, sensual book. The body of man and woman, the body of earth, riverbeds and the places of love—these are some of his subjects, hard sometimes to tell apart, maybe not really separate at all….

Gary Snyder has a most subtle ear. These seeming free-verse poems are full of delicate rhymes and juxtapositions as well as supple linkages of vowels. The corporeal elements of the words give substance to the conceptions, hold the poems together as the poems do the world….

This is the kind of book that makes one want to make love to someone one loves. It dexterously blends physical and spiritual.

Dan Jaffe, "A Shared Language in the Poet's Tongue," in Saturday Review (copyright © 1971 by Saturday Review; first appeared in Saturday Review, April 3, 1971; used with permission), April 3, 1971, pp. 31-3, 46.

Snyder is probably the most influential—on the young—poet of his generation—influential as a poet on new poets, that is. Ginsberg is still the charismatic leader. Snyder is the best informed, most...