Gary Snyder

Famous playwright, William Shakespeare once said, “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin”. Imagine if there were no plants or animals, how would humans survive? Humans depend on the environment, whether for medicine, entertainment, ambience, or companionship. Humans gain knowledge from nature, for example: in 1947, NASA sent Albert II, a male rhesus monkey, into outer space to see if he could survive in the harsh conditions, and he did. Albert II allowed for NASA to send humans into…

the canal, offering restaurants, bars, and cafes. But in crafting Nyhavn, we lost the beauty of the natural surroundings, for the buildings obstruct the canal from afar, and their tall facades curtain any form of nature except the sky directly above. Gary Snyder’s 1996 poem “Covers the Ground” focuses on similar environmental issues, juxtaposing man-made structures with nature. In the poem, imagery reveals how man-made structures overpower nature in order to criticize the loss of wilderness to…

place where people conformed to what mainstream society wanted them to be, but some individuals wanted no part of that system. These individuals included Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burrough, also in a looser sense artists such as Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac was the person who initially coined the phrase “Beat Generation”. The main group of Beat poets were people who attended Columbia at the same time. Even though these poets were all highly educated they all rebelled against the…

Buddhism is an ancient discipline, but it still managements to intersect with modern religion at a lot of junctions. In the 20th and 21st centuries, especially, the teachings of the Buddha have become more prevalent, not only in Buddhist circles, but also in non-Buddhist treatment of certain events, philosophies and concepts. The products of these intersections of modern writing and Buddhism demonstrate a strong leaning towards secularism, and neo-spirituality – both of which are essentially the…

counterculture and to mainstream America, his , at minimum, through his book One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, featuring a Native American narrator. Smith stated that Kesey was the "bridge" between the Beat Generation and the hippie culture, and that Gary Snyder brought in a more "sophisticated" element to the counterculture connection. Smith mentioned the Beats connection, but arguably did not give enough credit to Jack Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg. or even Neal Cassady for influencing Kesey,…