In a brief text directly reminiscent of the earth-beating song in Canto 49, Gary Snyder brings together several characteristic features of his work – directness, economy, clarity of expression – which he shares particularly with the Pound of the imagist manifesto and Cathay:

What most carries over from Pound's earth-beating song here, of course, is the short, sharply accentual line and the elemental quality of the language, which is closely related to the connection in the poem between natural events and human acts. Like the speaker of Pound's poem, the speaker here is the spokesperson for a community and a way of life that are highly naturalized, governed by natural events. In “The Etiquette of Freedom,” an essay which can be read in part as a revisionary updating of Emerson's Nature, and which aims to dismantle the civilized definition of nature as the opposite of culture, Snyder characterizes such a community as a “primary culture,” a society “whose economic system is in a close and sustainable relation to the local ecosystem,” and he gives a distinctly Fenollosan cast to his description of all “social organization” and “order in government” as “a set of forms that have been appropriated by the calculating mind from the operating principles in nature.”