“theirs is a kind of ecological esthetics”: Three Mountain Poems by Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen

I

In 1957 West Coast poet Kenneth Rexroth published “Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation” in New World Writing No. 11. The Beats, according to Rexroth, were “interested in Far Eastern art and religion; some even call themselves Buddhists. Politically they are all strong disbelievers in State, war, and the values of commercial civilization” (53). West Coast poets were not just turning toward East Asia for inspiration, they were also turning away from their own country— away from McCarthyism, racism, complacency, sprawling Levittowns, thermonuclear detonations, and suburban fallout shelters. They were in, as Rexroth explains, “a state of revolt so absolute that its elders cannot even recognize it. The disaffiliation, alienation, and rejection of the young has, as far as their elders are concerned, moved out of the visible spectrum altogether” (42). While this disaffiliation drew them spiritually and philosophically toward the East, it also, through their study of Chinese rivers and mountains poetry, Zen philosophy, and meditation practices, brought some of the younger West Coast poets back into the American landscape with a profound understanding and appreciation for their place in (and responsibility toward) the environment. In a way, they were following their Modernist predecessors such as Stein, Hemingway, Pound, and Eliot who moved to Europe after the previous world war to help redefine themselves and their nation.

The year 1957 also saw the publication of Alan Watts’s influential book The Way of Zen, which pointed out that the time was right in America for a spiritual awakening:

Our very history has seriously undermined the common-sense assumptions which lie at the roots of our social conventions and institutions. Familiar concepts of space, time, and motion, of nature and natural law, of history and social change, and of human personality itself have dissolved, and we find ourselves adrift without landmarks in a universe which more and more resembles the Buddhist principle of the ‘Great Void.’ The various wisdoms of the West, religious, philosophical, and scientific, do not offer much guidance to the art of living in such a universe, and we find the prospects of making our way in so trackless an ocean of relativity rather frightening. For we are used to absolutes, to firm principles and laws to which we can cling for spiritual and psychological security.

(vii–viii)

As Watts points out, the post-atomic age has brought us face-to-face with the very real potential destruction of the world and everything we hold so dear— “assumptions,” “conventions,” “institutions,” “concepts,” and so forth. “This is why,” he says of the burgeoning counterculture’s engagement with Eastern philosophy, “there is so much interest in a culturally productive way of life which, for some fifteen hundred years, has felt thoroughly at home in ‘the Void,’ and which not only feels no terror for it but rather a positive delight” (viii). This Void of which Watts speaks is another term for the Buddhist notion of śūnyatā, or emptiness, where western binaries such as this versus that, right versus wrong, and us versus them give way to suchness, interconnection, and perpetual unfolding; where, as Dwight Goddard— who Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder were reading at the time— put it in his translation of The Heart Sutra, “form is emptiness, emptiness is not different from form, neither is form different from emptiness, indeed, emptiness is form” (85).

Rexroth likewise speaks of the intellectual and cultural break in the western mind keenly felt by Snyder, Whalen, and other members of the counterculture who turned to the nondualist “ocean of relativity” and new (older) conceptions of “nature and natural law . . . and social change” posited by Eastern philosophy in the concluding chapter of his 1971 American Poetry in the Twentieth Century:

Twenty years before ecology became a fashionable evasion, Snyder and Whalen . . . were talking about the ecological revolution and the community of love and learning from the mountains and rivers and the Indians of the Northwest and studying Buddhism and Hinduism. . . . With Snyder, Whalen, Rothenberg, Bill Knott, Leonard Cohen, we are already deep into...