“How we go on”: Tradition’s Talent and the Individual Poet in Gary Snyder’s “Axe Handles”

Abstract: This essay examines Gary Snyder’s poem from various aspects: T. S. Eliot’s “tradition,” Ezra Pound’s “ideas in action,” and Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy, to name a few. The learning at issue here is open and unconstrained, if only because in the short “Axe Handles,” things heard, seen, learnt, and internalized a long while ago at first hand matter. Furthermore, students see the advantage of tradition’s talent guided along the “at-handed” ease of access. Indic traditions of learning through narratives, tales as gifts, make this business obligation-free— both for the masters and disciples. Snyder’s poem is that splendid common ground on which preceptors and pupils meet and come to terms with such concepts as work, art, and wisdom. They are framed in both western and eastern cultural terms in arguing why and how the poem shows, placed within the commercial concerns of the contemporary academic, the humanities matter deeply.