Abstract
Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Snyder’s poetry and poetics reflect a lifetime spent learning and practicing an attitude to experience, at once contemplative and active, shaped from the interaction of international cultures, mythologies, religions, and ideas. He is one of the foremost figures in the American ecological literary movement. Underlying his ecological writing is a study of cultural and ideological influence that reaches from East Asian religion and culture to Native American history, folklore and tradition. Snyder is always exploring what he terms interconnectedness, interdependence, and interpenetration —or in Buddhist terms: sunyata —a concept wherein “phenomena are śû nya or unreal because no phenomenon when taken by itself is thinkable: they are all interdependent and have no separate existence of their own.” 1
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Notes
Charles Eliot, Japanese Buddhism, ed. G. B. Sansom (1935; Richmond: Curzon Press, 1993), 81.
Wendell Berry, “Interim Thoughts about Gary Snyder’s ‘Mountains and Rivers Without End,’” The Sewanee Review 106.1 (1998): 148–53, JSTOR, (Aug. 9, 2010), 150.
Bob Steuding, Gary Snyder (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1976).
Tim Dean, Gary Snyder and the American Unconscious: Inhabiting the Ground (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).
Charles Molesworth, Gary Snyder’s Vision: Poetry and the Real Work (Colombia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1983), Literary Frontiers.).
Helen Vendler, Soul Says: On Recent Poetry ( Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 7.
Ashton Nichols, Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbannatural Roosting, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) xvi.).
Seamus Perry, “Romantic Poetry: An Overview,” The Cambridge History of English Poetry, ed. Michael O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 418–39.
William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed, David V. Erdman, (1965; Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1982), 665. Unless indicated otherwise, all Blake quotations are from this edition.
Matthew Arnold, The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 2nd ed., ed., Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1979).
A. C. Bradley, “Wordsworth,” Oxford Lectures on Poetry, intro. M. R. Ridley (1909; London: Macmillan, 1965), 101, 134.
Perry quotes from Paul De Man’s Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1983), 198.
Michael O’Neill, ed., Literature of the Romantic Period: A Bibliographical Guide (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 20.
William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), The Cornell Wordsworth, 751.
Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold: Technical Notes and Queries for Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries (New York: New Directions, 1969), 39. This concept is discussed in depth in chapter 3.
Eliot Weinberger, “Gary Snyder: The Art of Poetry: LXXIV,” Paris Review 38.141 (Winter 1996): 89–118, Literature Online, Mar. 30, 2009.
Albert Gelpi, A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance 1910–1950 (1987; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3.
Michael O’Neill, The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 60–82.
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 96.
Anthony Hunt, Genesis, Structure and Meaning in Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004), Western Literature Series, 176.
Ekbert Faas, Towards a New American Poetics: Essays and Interviews (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1978), 124.
Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 111.
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© 2013 Paige Tovey
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Tovey, P. (2013). Introduction. In: The Transatlantic Eco-Romanticism of Gary Snyder. The New Urban Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137340153_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137340153_1
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