Gary Snyder has won
the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which awarded annually by the Poetry Foundation.
Gary Snyder, a poet known for his verse about nature and spirituality and a former member of the beat movement along with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, has won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, awarded annually by the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation.
"Gary Snyder is in essence a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any one god or way of being so much as to Being itself," Christian Wiman, chair of the selection committee, said in a statement Tuesday.
"His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation."
Snyder, who turns 78 in May, has published such collections as "Regarding Wave," "No Nature" and "Turtle Island," winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1975.
