Volume 19 291Snyder addressed this issue in “The East West
Interview,” in The Real Work. He pointed out that
the purpose of Zen meditation (zazen) is to expe-
rience the simplicity of being aware of oneself, of
coming to know who one is without all the dis-
tracting thoughts and sense impressions that nor-
mally crowd into the mind. But, the aim is not to
stay permanently in meditation, but to come back
to everyday life, preferably maintaining sponta-
neously the experience of being gained during med-
itation. As Snyder says, “I still wouldn’t sit [i.e. in
meditation] ten hours a day unless somebody
forced me, because there’s too much other work in
the world to be done. Somebody’s got to grow the
tomatoes.”
It is this thought that is in the mind of the poet
at the conclusion of “True Night.” His enjoyment
of his nocturnal excursion was profound, but there
are others who depend on him, and they must have
priority.
Source:Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on “True Night,” in
Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003.John P. O’Grady
In the following essay, O’Grady discusses Sny-
der’s life and works.Gary Snyder is one of the most important
American poets of the second half of the twentieth
century. He has written with eloquence, intellectual
power, and mythopoeic grandeur in celebration and
defense of the natural world. In his With Eye and
Ear(1970) the poet Kenneth Rexroth describes
Snyder as “a master of challenge and confronta-
tion, not because he seeks controversy but because
his values are so conspicuous, so plainly stated in
the context of simple, sensuous, impassioned fact
that they cannot be dodged.” Although Snyder has
achieved renown for his role in introducing Amer-
ican readers to the literature and spirit of Asia, he
is first and foremost a writer of the American West.
Gary Sherman Snyder was born in San Fran-
cisco on 8 May 1930, during the early months of
the Great Depression. His mother, Lois Wilkey
Snyder, was a Texan, some of whose ancestors had
lived in Kansas; his father, Harold Snyder, was a
native of Washington State. A year and a half af-
ter Snyder’s birth the family moved to a farm north
of Seattle, where they scratched out a meager in-
come amid the stumps of a cutover forest. Snyder
was deeply imbued with his parents’ working-class,
West-Coast, left-wing ideas, and in the rain forests
and mountain landscapes of the Puget Sound re-
gion he came to the realization that the environ-ment serves more complex human needs than that
for natural resources. This recognition later emerged
as his most profound theme, both as a writer and a
political activist.
From childhood Snyder was a voracious reader.
His mother, a writer herself, encouraged her son’s
literary sensibility by taking him on weekly excur-
sions to the public library in the University District
of Seattle, where he would check out ten to twelve
books a week. In his teenage years Snyder discov-
ered the writings of John Muir and Robinson Jef-
fers, two authors widely regarded by critics as his
literary precursors. While these writers served to
focus his thinking along the lines of what he now
refers to as “Bioregionalism,” Snyder’s aesthetic
foundations had already been laid by his childhood
reading of such Western writers as Stewart Edward
White, H. L. Davis, Charles Erskin Scott Wood,
and Oliver La Farge, as well as books, both eth-
nographic and literary, about Native American
cultures.
At the beginning of World War II the Snyders
moved to a low-income housing project in Port-
land, Oregon. When his parents’ marriage dis-
solved near the end of the war, Snyder and his
younger sister, Anthea, remained with their mother.
Although he was living in the city, his feeling for
the Western landscape was fortified by his view of
the snowy “Guardian Peaks” of the Columbia—
Mount Hood, Mount St. Helens, and Mount
Adams—that hovered on the Portland horizon. In
the summer of 1945 Snyder ascended Mount St.
Helens as part of an old-style climbing party from
the YMCA camp at Spirit Lake. The following year
he joined the Mazamas, a mountaineering organi-
zation based in Portland; he went on to climb manyTrue NightAlthough Snyder has
achieved renown for his
role in introducing
American readers to the
literature and spirit of
Asia, he is first and
foremost a writer of the
American West.”67082 _PFS_V19truen 283 - 310 .qxd 9/16/2003 10:00 M Page 291