Romantic Aspiration, Romantic Doubt

Abstract

Numerous paradoxes attend the dream we have inherited from the Romantics that poetry somehow performs epistemological and social functions.” ¹ These paradoxes, as Altieri brings out in his reading of Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island (1974), primarily stem from the divergent roles of the poet as seer, whose visionary “expressions are never intelligible to the society,” ² and as prophet, whose role is to speak to and for society. Altieri suggests that Snyder’s strengths in Turtle Island lie in his accomplishments as a poetic seer and that his failures arise from his weakness as a prophet in the sense that he is often unwilling to compromise the integrity of his message in order that a wider audience may understand. Much of what Altieri has to say on the subject of Snyder as a successful seer and perhaps less-than-successful prophet is persuasive, and his ideas have served as a catalyst for the explorations of this chapter. However, my examination of Snyder as a poet who attempts to mediate between the roles of seer and prophet is concerned more specifically with examining how Snyder’s poetic aspirations reflect not only the aspirations of his Romantic predecessors toward becoming prophets, seers, and poets, or what Shelley calls “the unacknowledged legislators of the World” (A Defence of Poetry 701), but also the way in which the conflict between the divergent, as well as convergent, roles of prophet and seer reflect the dichotomy of the urban and natural landscapes. Snyder’s poetic aspiration involves the desire to speak as a prophet of nature and to guide his community to a recovery of the pastoral.