Snyder Themes Forum

As a class, we discussed themes in Gary Snyder's Turtle Island. For the most part, the poems in Turtle Island have themes related to nature and the bioregion. In many of his poems, Snyder implies that humans have a negative impact on nature. In poems such as The Dead by the Side of the Road, the theme is that humans are wasteful when it comes to the environment. As a whole, humans take the wilderness for granted. This is negatively affecting the bioregion in huge ways. Snyder implies this in many of his poems.