SOURCE: "The Political and Poetic Vision of Turtle Island" in Gary Snyder's Vision, University of Missouri Press, 1983, pp. 144-56.

In the following essay, Molesworth discusses the political and poetic viewpoints of Snyder's Pulitizer-prize-winning work, Turtle Island.

We can take Snyder's Turtle Island as the most complete expression of his political and poetic vision, not only because it is his most recent finished volume, but also because it contains the fullest mediations of the themes and concerns of all his work. I propose to look at the book as incorporating three mediations. First, Turtle Island serves Snyder with a chief metaphor for a physical environment and a Utopian vision. As he puts it in the "Introductory Note," Turtle Island is the "old / new name for the continent, based on many creation myths of the people who have been living here for millennia." The metaphor of the continent floating on...