["True insight"] to Snyder is "a love-making hovering between the void & the immense worlds of creation,"… and poetry, as its subtlest medium of expression, walks "that edge between what can be said and that which cannot be said … [I]t's going out into emptiness and into the formless" while at the same time resting on "an absolute foundation of human experience and insight."… The "pure inspiration flow" bringing it forth is "not intellect and not—(as romantics and after have confusingly thought) fantasy-dream world or unconsciousness." On the contrary, true poetry "reflects all things and feeds all things but is of itself transparent."…

True to this theory, Snyder's poetry, like that of his Eastern peers, often radiates with an almost unearthly clarity and precision, whereby the sensual concreteness of every detail seems as if suffused with this transparence or awareness of the void. What seems so deceptively simple, is, in fact, a unique, by now widely imitated, yet probably inimitable achievement within Western poetry. Little gaps of silence frequently seem to separate one utterance from the next, and, like the brush strokes of calligraphic paintings, each phrase or remark, like the phenomenon or event it embodies, seems to rest within the energy of its own tension, autonomous, and yet related to all others in the hidden field of force, creating its "complexity far beneath the surface texture."… (p. 96)

[Just] as the Eastern poets he translated cover a wide range of modes and tones, from the mystical luminosity of Chinese Hanshan to the mythopoeic deep imagery or colloquial satire of Japanese Miyazawa Kenji, so [Snyder's] own work is by no means limited to the lyric mode of his "Flowers for the Void" … "going out into emptiness and into the formless which is the nature of pure joy."… Snyder often speaks with a funny, self-ironical, satirical or outspokenly didactic voice, while a work like Myths & Texts (1960), hailed by Robert Bly as "one of the two or three finest books of poetry" of its decade …, presents us with a subtly orchestrated structure, centered around specific symbols and myths that were inspired by "the happy collections Sapir, Boas, Swanton, and others made of American Indian folktales early in this century."… Julian Gitzen, in an extensive interpretation of the poem, has compared Myths & Texts with The Waste Land, though one may add that the "fragmental texture" which in Eliot's poem expresses anguished spiritual chaos in the face of nothingness ("These fragments I have shored against my ruins") serves Snyder as a positive means for apprehending reality in its preconceptual suchness (tathātā) and as a medium for his poetic "re-enactment of [the] timeless dance: here and now, co-creating forever, for no end but now."… (pp. 99-100)

Another major poetic mode, that of his long poem in progress entitled Mountains and Rivers without End, at first seems to invite comparison with the American epic tradition from Leaves of Grass to the Maximus Poems. Yet as Snyder explained in 1959, it in fact emulates further models of Eastern literature and art. Its "dramatic structure follows a certain type of Nō play," while its overall structure (which "threatens to be like its title") was conceived "after a Chinese sidewise scroll painting."… (p. 100)

It would be tantamount to splitting hairs to try to trace these various modes in terms of their successive evolution in the poet's life. Even in his beginnings, Snyder, unlike Robert Lowell or other poets of the "confessional" genre, for instance, displays none of the tormented, self-questioning, and often suicidal spiritual tendencies, so typical of post-Romantic poetry in the West. Instead, he seems to have evolved these several modes almost simultaneously and as from a common basis, and to have deepened, refined and elaborated them ever since. As Snyder points out himself, Mountains and Rivers without End (of which the first Six Sections were published in 1965) was begun as early as 1956, Myths & Texts (1960) "grew" between 1952 and 1956 …, while the poems of the more "lyric order" as he calls them … already dominate his first published collection of 1959 (Riprap). Even earlier, in his diary of the years 1952–3, Snyder had begun to formulate the basic premises of his philosophy and poetics: his experience of "no identity" and "the void," his epistemological "love-making hovering between the void & the immense worlds of creation," his concept of form as "ellipse, is emptiness," the subsequent experience of linguistic disintegration ("my language fades. Images of erosion") and the attempt to reconstitute language after the model of Chinese poetry cross-bred with the primordial potential of the Anglo-Saxon heritage. It was equally early in his career that Snyder assumed his clean-slate stance in favor of Primitive and Eastern mentality ("Let's be animals or buddhas" …) and against the Judaeo-Christian world view…. (p. 101)

To be sure, Snyder's early work shows traces of the confessional ("Bitter memory like vomit / Choked my throat") or romantically subjective mode, at times almost reminiscent of a poet like Matthew Arnold, stoically resigned to the cruelty of life, yet at the same time yearning for human compassion…. But far more forceful and ubiquitous is the impulse to negate all the "pointless wars of the heart" … and to come to terms with human suffering generally. Questioned about his attitude towards the confessional school of poets, Snyder replied: "I'm a Buddhist, which is to say you take suffering and impermanence for granted, as a base fact of the universe, and then proceed on from there."… Again, such an attitude is by no means new to Snyder and was in fact assumed even before the confessional poets made their first appearance in Anglo-American literature. As early as 1956, Snyder, age 26, concluded that there comes

a time when the poet must choose: either to step deep in the stream of his people, history, tradition, folding and folding himself in wealth of persons and pasts; philosophy, humanity, to become richly foundationed and great and sane and ordered. Or, to step beyond the bound onto the way out, into horrors and angels, possible madness or silly Faustian doom, possible utter transcendence, possible enlightened return, possible ignominious wormish perishing….

By his subsequent creativity, personal development and indefatigable involvement in ecological, social, cultural and purely human concerns, Snyder has left no doubt as to which of these two paths he has chosen as his own. (pp. 102-03)