Gary Snyder, a poet known for his verse about nature and spirituality, has won the United States' richest poetry prize, the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Snyder, 78, began writing in the 1950s as a member of the beat movement along with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He spent most of the '60s in a Zen monastery in Japan. He was the inspiration for Japhy Ryder in Kerouac's The Dharma Bums.

Now a professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Snyder lives in northern California.

The jury called him "a deeply learned and meditative artist, an impassioned ecologist, and a poet of great scope.

"Gary Snyder is a true nature poet: there's no sentimentalism to his work, and he never uses the natural world simply to celebrate his own sensibility," the jury said.

Snyder is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, essays, and translations. His poetry collections include Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, The Back Country, Regarding Wave, No Nature, Mountains and Rivers Without End and Danger on Peaks.

He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for Turtle Island and also earned the John Hay award for nature writing.

The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize was established in 1986 and is presented annually by the Poetry Foundation of Chicago. Lilly, the great-grandchild of pharmaceutical magnate Eli Lilly, was a wealthy woman and philanthropist who loved poetry throughout her lifetime and even tried to write it, though she was never published.

With files from the Associated Press