His early poetry has been associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance and he has been described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology".

"So my folks brought me piles of books from the Seattle Public Library," he recalled in an interview, "and it was then I really learned to read and from that time on was voracious — I figure that accident changed my life.

To get this job, he joined the now-defunct Marine Cooks and Stewards union,[11] and would later work as a seaman in the mid-1950s to gain experience of other cultures in port cities.

Snyder's reading of the writings of D. T. Suzuki had in fact been a factor in his decision not to continue as a graduate student in anthropology, and in 1953 he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, to study Asian culture and languages.

This inspired Snyder to attempt something equivalent in poetry, and with Hasegawa's encouragement, he began work on Mountains and Rivers Without End, which would be completed and published 40 years later.

As the large majority of people in the Beat movement had urban backgrounds, writers like Ginsberg and Kerouac found Snyder, with his backcountry and manual-labor experience and interest in things rural, a refreshing and almost exotic individual.

This also marked Snyder's first involvement with the Beats, although he was not a member of the original New York circle, having entered the scene through his association with Whalen and Welch.

Independently, some of the Beats, including Whalen, had become interested in Zen, but Snyder was one of the more serious scholars of the subject among them, preparing in every way he could think of for eventual study in Japan.

[23] In the end, his expenses were paid by Ruth Fuller Sasaki, for whom he was supposed to work; but initially he served as personal attendant and English tutor[24] to Zen abbot Miura Isshu, at Rinko-in, a temple in Shokoku-ji in Kyoto, where American Buddhist popularizer Dwight Goddard and British author and Japanese culture devotee R. H. Blyth had preceded him.

[26] In 1958, he returned to California via the Persian Gulf, Turkey, Sri Lanka and various Pacific Islands, voyaging as a crewman in the engine room on the oil tanker Sappa Creek,[27][28] and took up residence at Marin-an again.

[32] He married Kyger on February 28, 1960, immediately after her arrival in Japan, which Fuller Sasaki insisted they do, if they were to live together and be associated with the Nichibei Daiichi Zen Kyokai,.

[13] During the period between 1956 and 1969, Snyder went back and forth between California and Japan,[34] studying Zen, working on translations with Fuller Sasaki, and finally living for a while with a group of other people on the small, volcanic island of Suwanosejima.

His previous study of written Chinese assisted his immersion in the Zen tradition, which has its roots in Tang dynasty China, and enabled him to support himself while he was living in Japan.

Much of Snyder's poetry expresses experiences, environments, and insights involved with the work he has done for a living: logger, fire-lookout, steam-freighter crew, translator, carpenter, and itinerant poet, among other things.

He advocated "using such means as civil disobedience, outspoken criticism, protest, pacifism, voluntary poverty and even gentle violence" and defended "the right of individuals to smoke ganja, eat peyote, be polygynous, polyandrous or homosexual" which he saw as being banned by "the Judaeo-Capitalist-Christian-Marxist West".

They were shortly able to move onto the San Juan Ridge property, near the South Yuba River, where they and friends built a house that drew on rural-Japanese and Native-American architectural ideas.

Many of these were collected in Earth House Hold (1969), The Old Ways (1977), The Real Work (1980), The Practice of the Wild (1990), A Place in Space (1995), and The Gary Snyder Reader (1999).

In these, his wide-ranging interests in cultures, natural history, religions, social critique, contemporary America, and hands-on aspects of rural life, as well as his ideas on literature, were given full-blown articulation.

However, in 1996 he published the complete Mountains and Rivers Without End, a mixture of the lyrical and epic modes celebrating the act of inhabitation on a specific place on the planet.

The author and editor Stewart Brand once wrote: "Gary Snyder's poetry addresses the life-planet identification with unusual simplicity of style and complexity of effect.

"[46] According to Jody Norton, this simplicity and complexity derives from Snyder's use of natural imagery (geographical formations, flora, and fauna) in his poems.

However, since his youth he has been quite literate, and he has written about his appreciation of writers of similar sensibilities, like D. H. Lawrence, William Butler Yeats, and some of the great ancient Chinese poets.

In 2004, receiving the Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Awards Grand Prize, Snyder highlighted traditional ballads and folk songs, Native American songs and poems, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Jeffers, Ezra Pound, Noh drama, Zen aphorisms, Federico García Lorca, and Robert Duncan as significant influences on his poetry, but added, "the influence from haiku and from the Chinese is, I think, the deepest.

"[51] Snyder is among those writers who have sought to dis-entrench conventional thinking about primitive peoples that has viewed them as simple-minded, ignorantly superstitious, brutish, and prone to violent emotionalism.

[52][53] Todd Ensign describes Snyder's interpretation as blending ancient tribal beliefs and traditions, philosophy, physicality, and nature with politics to create his own form of Postmodern environmentalism.

He purposely sets out to bring about change on the emotional, physical, and political levels by emphasizing the ecological problems faced by today's society.

[54] Snyder is widely regarded as a member of the Beat Generation circle of writers: he was one of the poets that read at the famous Six Gallery event, and was written about in one of Kerouac's most popular novels, The Dharma Bums.

Some critics argue that Snyder's connection with the Beats is exaggerated and that he might better be regarded as a part of the San Francisco Renaissance, which developed independently.

A quotation from a 1974 interview at the University of North Dakota Writers Conference (published in The Beat Vision): I never did know exactly what was meant by the term 'The Beats', but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen [Ginsberg], myself, Michael [McClure], Lawrence [Ferlinghetti], Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory [Corso], for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years.

It's very interesting that we find ourselves so much on the same ground again, after having explored divergent paths; and find ourselves united on this position of powerful environmental concern, critique of the future of the individual state, and an essentially shared poetics, and only half-stated but in the background very powerfully there, a basic agreement on some Buddhist type psychological views of human nature and human possibilities.