ABSTRACT
Gary Snyder's importance in the American poetic tradition is often overlooked. Yet his poetic achievements, which include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the Bollingen Prize for poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, among others, attest to the value of his poetic career and his contribution to the development of American free verse in the twentieth century. As an inheritor of both the Romantic and modernist traditions, Snyder is a post-Romantic poet who re-ignites, reforms, and re-imagines Romanticism for his own epoch. One of the most important themes in Snyder's poetry is the interrelation of things, and his poetry attempts to not only articulate a sense of this connection, or interpenetration, but to create a visible emblem of that relationship. Snyder uses his own unorthodox form, punctuation, and structure to play on the reader's background knowledge of and prior experience with traditional poetic form.
