The Gypsy Scholar is posting this essay by Beat/Eco-poet Gary Snyder, "Earth Day and the War Against the Imagination," simply because (a) it was the only piece of Snyder's he could find in the Tower of Song library that was delivered on Earth Day and because (b) more importantly the GS' own essay for Earth Day, "Romantic Naturalism & the Roots of the Environmental Movement," dealt with the theme of the role of the Imagination in the nineteenth-century writers and poets who rebelled against the philosophy behind the Industrial Revolution and sought to heal rift between man and nature.

The title of Gary Snyder's essay was inspired by a poem from a fellow Beat poet, Diane DiPrima: "The only war that matters is the war against the imagination." Although the GS didn't cite the totally appropriate lines from William Blake in this particular essay (though he did use this from Blake as an epigraph: "Nature is Imagination"), in past essays on the Romantic's hope for a radical social change through the American and French revolutions the GS has cited this from Blake: "Art Degraded, Imagination Denied, War Governed the Nations."  (But if, as the Romantics knew, Industrial society and its science was making war on nature, and if Blake equated nature with imagination, then the GS's epigraph from Blake nonetheless fits in with DiPrima's line.) Blake, the poet-prophet of the Imagination, believed that the real war carried out by the tyrannical state was, in one way or another, a war on the Imagination. He also knew (as did his Romantic counterparts in America--Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman) that the liberation of the Imagination on the eco-political level of democracy fulfilled the dream of the ideal society of the Romantics--what Blake called "Jerusalem" and what the GS, in his Earth Day essay, called "the Imagi-nation."  


"Earth Day and the War Against the Imagination"