Obituary of John Kennedy Snyder

SNYDER, John Kennedy (Ken), 1934-2024, Ketch Harbour, Nova Scotia.

In the early morning hours of December 13, 2024, Ken died peacefully at home in Ketch Harbour, Nova Scotia at the age of 90 years.

Born to Catherine (Kay McKeon) and John Snyder on August 17, 1934 in Brooklyn, New York, Ken spent his boyhood and youth in Sharon, Connecticut. Ken deeply loved the woodlands and forests of Northwest Connecticut and New England. His experience of the woods shaped his thought and sensibility, congruent with his reading Emerson, Thoreau, and Wordsworth.

Ken initially attended Housatonic Regional Valley High School. A diligent and gifted student, he was program chairman of the Civics Club, vice president of the Latin Club, and a member of the Student Council. A 9th grade essay on U.S. foreign policy and the Amerasia case was indicative of his perspicacity. Ken met former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt when she visited Housatonic in October of 1949 to address the school on the occasion of the school’s 10th anniversary. Ken’s academic record won him a scholarship to complete his studies at The Hotchkiss School where he received a superior classical education, graduating in 1953. Ken recalled attending summer chamber music concerts with classmate Michael (Mike) Sugarman and attributed his preference for the intimacy of string quartets and small ensembles to hearing those performances. Also part of the mix: jazz and Roswell Rudd’s enthusiasm for it.

Ken studied English Literature at Brown University (A.B. 1961). S. Foster Daimon, Blake scholar and poet, was a teacher and friend. Ken’s own poetry and prose writing was featured in Brunonia and the Brown Review. He interviewed Robert Frost in December of 1955 when Frost was at Brown to speak on poetry and read some of his poems. Ken’s article, “Robert Frost and the Dilemma”, was published in Brunonia shortly after.

A wild three-day shared relay drive to the West Coast began a hiatus from Brown in order for Ken to work and travel. He cooked in the kitchen of the Nepenthe Restaurant (where he first heard Grieg’s Lyric Pieces), worked as a lumberjack in Montana (where a felled tree caused a near brush with death), and spent the last months of 1958 on a trip to Ireland, England, and Paris. In the late spring and summer of 1959 he travelled to Ecuador, Peru, and Columbia.

Ken was introduced to Mary (then completing her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design) by his friend Henry L.P. Beckwith in 1960. Ken and Mary married that year in Providence. After his first daughter Ursula was born, he began graduate studies at Brown in 1962 (A.M. 1965). While writing his thesis (on Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance) Ken taught variously at the Rhode Island School of Design and Wayne State University. He began a PhD program at University of Michigan but instead turned to his own creative writing. He helped launch the literary magazine Anon with other members of the University of Michigan community.

Brown University librarian and friend, John R.T. Ettlinger, who was hired by Dalhousie University in 1967, suggested that Ken apply for a teaching position in the English Department at Saint Mary’s University. He did so and was offered a job beginning in the fall of 1968. Ken and his family immigrated to Nova Scotia that summer and found a home outside the city in the fishing village of Ketch Harbour. The powerful beauty of Ketch’s windswept coastline and seascape colours several of his poems. Ken also loved the pastoral farmlands of the Annapolis Valley and the Acadian Dykelands.

During his 30 years of teaching at Saint Mary’s University, at different times Ken had been a member of the Senate, Secretary of the Saint Mary’s University Faculty Union, Chair of the English Department, and member of the University Review Committee. Ken retired from SMU in 1999, but returned to teach part time briefly. Ken was an exacting, challenging, generous and well-respected teacher, colleague, and critic.

A fierce integrity and commitment to poetry was the compass of Ken’s life. As a member of SMU’s Visiting Speakers Committee, Ken was instrumental in bringing the renowned Irish poet Seamus Heaney to read at Saint Mary’s. His support of Canadian poet John Donlan’s work was unstinting.

In 1983-84 Ken taught English Literature as a Visiting Scholar at the Shandong Teachers’ University in Jinan, People’s Republic of China, through the Exchange Program Saint Mary’s had established with that institution. The very special year he spent in China was commemorated in five beautiful poems, three of which were published in The Antigonish Review.

In the summer of 1986, Ken was a member and participant in the School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth College. He was a serious student of critical theory and of psychoanalysis. He believed engagement with the work of Freud, Bion, Klein, Derrida, and others enabled potential for understanding, for working through the difficult human problems faced by individuals and societies.

A project initiated by Chidambaram Radha Krishna for Ken to revise the translation from Telugu of Dr. Kesava Reddy’s novella, Moogavani Pillanagrovi: Ballad of Ontillu (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013) and write a literary overview of Ontillu, was undertaken with compassion for the issue it addresses: the plight of farmers and farmer suicides in India.

Late in life he read the work of the great Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki. Sōseki’s outlook resonated with his own and his writing made a profound impression on Ken. He especially treasured Kusamakura (‘Grass Pillow’).

Ken did not have hobbies per se. He did have varying success with vegetable gardening and enjoyed putting wood together and building things, though he would be the first to admit he was a clumsy carpenter (Dupuytren’s contracture was no help). What he was doing was always reading, writing, and thinking about the world—mostly despairing of it, but not entirely losing hope for one better and more just.

Ken is survived by his wife Mary, daughters Ursula and Alisa, and sister Christine Lathrop (Cloverdale, California).

The Snyder family would like to thank Dr. David Tilley, Dr. Anne Marie Krueger-Naug, Continuing Care Coordinator Kyna Mason, Palliative Care RNs Debbie Hannam and Megan Summerfield, Tonya Kelloway at Northwood Home Care and Kevin and his team with EHS for their care of Ken.

Cremation has been entrusted to J. Albert Walker Funeral Home, 149 Herring Cove Road, Halifax, Nova Scotia.