"A kind of ice age, spreading, filling valleys
Shaving soils, paving fields, you can walk in it
Live in it, drive through it then
It melts away
For whatever sprouts

After the age of
Frozen hearts. Flesh carved rock
And gusts on the summit,
Smoke from forest fires is white,
The haze above the distant valley like a dusk
It's just one world this spine of rock and streams
And snow and the wash of gravels, silts
Sands, bunchgrasses, saltbrush, bee-fields,

Twenty million human people, downstream, here below."

The modernist writers Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams were huge influences on both Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg. The Beats, then, can be considered early post-Modernists.

But what the heck does it mean to be a post-modern writer—except that you wrote after the modernists? Well, these authors really experimented with writing style and writing content in order to mess with readers' expectations, of literature and of the world at large.

For example: many people in the 1940s and 1950s were really closed-minded about gay sex. And Allen Ginsberg blew the lid off of that can of worms by getting really personal.

Snyder, on the other hand, went green. He looked to nature and Eastern traditions for answers to life's biggest questions.

Snyder is a kinder, gentler post-modernist. While Ginsberg and Burroughs shook things up by shocking people with their drug and sex talk, and their non-linear narratives, Snyder gives us something different: a love for the environment. An interest in how we are all, at core, connected… You know, some good old-fashioned we are the world sentimentality. Just with a new agey, yoga-and-meditation-inspired twist.

Though he wrote about pretty things, Snyder's style is still distinctly post-modern. What do we mean by that? In this passage, you can see that Snyder infuses elements of the natural world with phrases that carry many meanings.

So again, we've got a poet who's trying to disrupt our expectations about language and life.

Like, it's hard to know exactly what his phrase "age of frozen hearts" may refer to. Maybe the last ice age? Maybe something much more esoteric—as in, during that postwar era, people were stuck in hollow, superficial existences that lacked a lot of humanity?

And the phrase "flesh carved rock" forces the reader to confront the impossibility of flesh being able to literally carve rock. So we must look for a deeper meaning… Hmm. Fleshy human hands use pick axes to carve rock.

Does that mean Snyder's talking about the effects of an industrial culture here? We're not quite sure. But the point is: post-modern poets make readers work for their meanings.

This is poetic boot camp people. Get ready to sweat.