"I . . . wrote once: 'As poet I hold the most archaic values on
earth. They go back to the upper Palaeolithic: the fertility of
the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the
terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance,
the common work of the tribe.'

"Why this going back into the roots and the past, instead of
leaping off into the future, I'm sometimes asked. But it's not in
time at all that we study our world and ourselves. There's no
close or far. We have, simply, the chance to fill out the whole
picture now, for the first time in human experience. It is begin-
ning to be possible to look in one wide gaze at all that human
beings have been and done on the whole planet, as one small
part of the web of Gaia the earth-life-Goddess.

"Then turn that over and over in the depths of deepest symbol-
holding store-house-consciousness mind, to maybe let another
flower of clarity rise from the compost of information. Such
flowers set us truly free and only come every few millenia.
I'm glad Myths & Texts is a warm part of the compost in this
end-of-the-century spectacle. I hope it helps toward growing
that flower that will be totally in the present.

GS 13.X.400077"

--Gary Snyder

fr. Myths & Texts
[New York: New Directions, 1978]
a reprinting of his collection originally published in
1960 by Totem Press / Corinth Books