The Romantic Pastoral: Snyder’s Ecological Literary Inheritance

Abstract

Snyder’s reputation and career are largely associated with and built upon his ecological philosophies and approach to living and thinking. As a poet whose work is based on an exploration and representation of the way that human beings interact with their environment, he has become a paradigm of the ecocritical movement in literature. His combination of a scientific outlook—he is knowledgeable and well read in biology, ecology, anthropology, geology, and other natural sciences—with the visionary stance of a poet and the spirituality of a dedicated Buddhist, has created a philosophy and works that both preempted and contributed to the establishment of the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s as well as the development in the late 1980s and 1990s of ecocriticism as an approach to literary and cultural theory and criticism. Recognition of this significance for ecocriticism is increasingly widespread. Writing for The Ecocriticism Reader, William Rueckert extols the virtues of Snyder’s Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Turtle Island, and concludes his discussion of Snyder’s work by stating: “Its relevance for this paper is probably so obvious that I should not pursue it any longer.” ¹