SOURCE: "Echoes of Eliot in Snyder's 'A Stone Garden,'" in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 17, No. 1, Summer, 1990, pp. 172-77.

In the following essay, Schork speculates on the influence of T. S. Eliot's poem "Preludes" on Snyder's "A Stone Garden."

When Gary Snyder in a 1954 letter to Kenneth Rexroth utterly dismissed the imitators of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, he indicated his lack of respect for poets who derive from the Modernist Masters:

Very well: high compression, complexity, linguistic involutions are all virtues in poetry—but in the hands of the mediocre, just so much frillery. Which disposes of the imitators of Ezra & Eliot.

Samuel Johnson said that no man became great by imitation, and Snyder doubts that such a poet can even be good. It is surprising, then, to find Snyder himself closely tracking Eliot's "Preludes" in "A Stone Garden," imitating its four-part structure and echoing...