RE-INHABITING THE ISLANDS - The University of North Carolina at ...

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Literary scholarship can engage maritime regions by preserving evocative texts and
explicating how their authors map ―interior journeys‖ to those bioregional places. I chose
Snyder and Walcott because of their similar views of ocean biomes and the
environmentally viable senses of place their texts evoke.
Gary Snyder is a canonical figure in modern American poetry and environmental
literature. As a poet and essayist, he has inspired readers to ―find [their] place on the
planet, dig in, and take responsibility from there‖ for close to forty years (Snyder, Turtle
Island 101). Roderick Nash praises Snyder in Wilderness & the American Mind for his
―Thoreau-like‖ balance of ―nature and technology, spirit and science, the Indian‘s way
and the white man‘s, wilderness and civilization‖ (246). Max Oelschlaeger calls him the
―poet laureate of deep ecology‖ in Idea of Wilderness (261). Lawrence Buell writes in
The Future of Environmental Criticism that Snyder has been ―particularly influential as a
definer and spokesperson‖ of reinhabitation: looking to the land‘s prior inhabitants as
models for sustainable relationships to the land; and of bioregionalism: living in
deference to the ecological limits of a particular watershed or ―focus of citizenly
allegiance‖ (135; 145). Patrick Murphy, through his publication of Critical Essays on
Gary Snyder, Understanding Gary Snyder, and A Place for Wayfaring: The Poetry and
Prose of Gary Snyder, has laid a significant foundation for literary scholars interested in
articulating a syncretic vision of biocentric society through Snyder‘s work and influences.
Timothy Gray‘s Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim makes an elaborate and compelling
argument for the poet‘s ―incipient global consciousness‖ (x; introd.) of the seemingly
disparate coastal peoples living as co-inhabitants of the Pacific bioregion.