SOURCE: "From Lookout to Ashram: The Way of Gary Snyder," in Critical Essays on Gary Snyder, G. K. Hall & Co., 1991, pp. 58-80.

In the following excerpt, Paul reveals correlations between personal events in Snyder's life and his development as both a poet and an environmentalist

I know of no one since Thoreau who has so thoroughly espoused the wild as Gary Snyder—and no one who is so much its poet. His root metaphor, the "back country," covers all that Thoreau, explicitly or implicitly, meant by the "wild." "Poetry and the Primitive," one of the recent essays collected in Earth House Hold (1969), is his most important statement and the resolution of much of his work, an essay comparable in import, though not in distinction of style, to Thoreau's "Walking." Thoreau's essay, originally a lecture called "The Wild," is testamentary, and so is Snyder's, though his is not terminal...