By the late 1950s, Snyder had established himself as one of the major American poets of his generation. He was associated with both the Beat Generation and the regional San Francisco Renaissance. He spent much of the 1960s traveling between California and Japan, where he studied Zen. In 1966, he met Masa Uehara while in Osaka. They married the following year and had their first child, Kai, in April 1968; by December, Snyder and his new family moved to California.[2] His return coincided with the highest crest of 1960s counterculture, as well as the nascent environmental movement. He was received as an elder statesman by both the hippies and the environmentalists, and he became a public intellectual who gave public lectures, making television appearances, and publishing new writing.[3]
Many of the poems and essays in the book had been previously published. The essay "Four Changes" first appeared in The Environmental Handbook, a collection published by David Brower and Friends of the Earth for the first Earth Day in 1970.[4] "Four Changes" was initially published anonymously with no copyright notice, and consequently it was widely reproduced.[5] One of the poems, "The Hudsonian Curlew", was first published in the November 1969 issue of Poetry magazine.[6] Some of the poems were published in 1972 as a limited-edition collection titled Manzanita.[7]
Many of the poems in Turtle Island are political in nature, like much of Snyder's poetry of the late 1960s, albeit with a different focus than that of his earlier writings. With American military involvement in the Vietnam War coming to a close, Snyder's attention had turned from matters of war and peace to environmental and ecological concerns. In 1973 several of Snyder's friends, interested in his new direction, gathered in Berkeley, California to hear him read his new work. At the reading, Snyder asked whether these political poems could "succeed as poetry"; his friends "reportedly refused to pass judgment" on the question.[8] Later, the poet's UC Davis colleague Jack Hicks related words from a female graduate student who took one of Snyder's classes in the late 1980s: "there are two kinds of political poetry: Suckers—rare—seduce you to the point. Whackers assault you with the message. ... I cited Turtle Island as a blatant whacker, and Gary defended it strongly. But first he listened."[9]
