Journeys toward the original mind: The longer poems of Gary Snyder

This study offers the first comprehensive examination and explication of Gary Snyder's long poems, Myths & Texts and Mountains and Rivers Without End. Myths & Texts explores one of the fundamental issues of our time, the destruction of nature, and sets forth a series of sophisticated steps, based on Snyder's knowledge of Vajrayana and Zen Buddhism, Amerindian cultures, and ecology, by which humans can achieve moral and spiritual harmony with her. Mountains and Rivers Without End comprises a series of experimental poems that expand upon themes adumbrated in Myths & Texts: the alienation of humans from nature and self, conditions caused primarily by capitalism and the spiritual confusions it initiates, and the search for the proper relationship between humans and nature, finally discovered in the Enlightenment experience and "healing songs," poetic celebrations of the unity between man and nature. Snyder has fashioned many poetic versions of the Enlightenment experience and the "healing song," both discoveries of the "original mind".; At the heart of Snyder's poetics rests the concept of "original mind," that state of mind which has been sensually, morally, and spiritually purified so that it can directly experience the truth of the universe, the Dharma, "the grain of things in the larger picture" (Snyder, The Real Work 112). The powers of "original mind" are most fully displayed by the shaman, the Bodhisattva, and the poet, figures which play major roles in Myths & Texts and Mountains and Rivers Without End.; This study proceeds beyond previous critical works on Snyder's poetry in four ways: it considers, in depth, all of the sections of Myths & Texts and all of the poems that presently constitute Mountains and Rivers, a career-long project of Snyder's; it employs anthropological, mythological, theological, and ecological materials, arising from the birthplaces of "original mind," to further illuminate its literary insights; it fully traces the key theme of Snyder's poetics, the "original mind," throughout the poems; moreover, the critical approach unifies the main strands of Snyder's longer poetry as it has developed from 1960 to the present.