Gary Snyder

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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 Mountain Poems, translations from the Chinese); Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End (1965, expanded 1970), part of an ongoing long work treating journeys, literal and metaphoric; A Range of Poems (1966), a selection of previous publications with additions; The Back Country (1968), on early experiences in the Far West, Japan, and India and his return to the U.S.; Regarding Wave (1970), poems both philosophic in his dedication to Buddhism and personal in telling of his love for his Japanese wife; Manzanita (1972), a limited edition forming part of Turtle Island (1974, Pulitzer Prize), poetry and prose setting forth his views of humanity, nature, and religion; and Left Out in the Rain (1986), containing brief poems often in quite conventional forms written since 1947. No Nature, New and Selected Poems (1992) is a sampling of his life's work. Earth House Hold (1969) collects essays and journal jottings on poetry, primitivism, communal life, and ecology, and The Old Ways (1977) is a small, lesser collection of essays. Snyder figures as Japhy Ryder in Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. Since 1985 he has taught at the University of California, Davis.

Gary Snyder 1930–, American poet, b. San Francisco. Associated with the beat generation of the 1950s, he lived (1956–68) in Japan, where he trained as a Zen monk. His poetry, influenced by Zen Buddhism and by Native American culture, celebrates the peace found in nature and decries its destruction; volumes include Myths and Texts (1960), Turtle Island (1974; Pulitzer Prize), Axe Handles (1983), No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1992), the epic Mountains and Rivers without End (1996, repr. 2008), and Danger on Peaks (2004). Snyder has written numerous essays, and his influential treatise Four Changes (1969) is an early expression of the environmental movement. He taught (1986–2001) at the Univ. of California, Davis.

Bibliography: See his Look Out: A Selection of Writings (2002); studies by K. White (1975), B. Steuding (1976), B. Almon (1979), C. Molesworth (1983), T. Dean (1991), P. D. Murphy, ed. (1990) and as author (1991 and 2000), R. Schuler (1994), and T. Gray (2006).