A Literary History of the American West

William Stafford

EARLY IN HIS CAREER William Stafford recognized that "poetry is the kind of thing you have to see from the corner of your eye." In Writing the Australian Crawl he tells how he learned the poet's craft at the University of Iowa where he joined Paul Engle's workshop. That was in 1950 when, with his wife, Dorothy, and their two young sons, he "pulled into Iowa City" in their "old green Chevy." Two years later when the Staffords left Iowa City, he had passed his orals and Winterward, a small volume of poetry, had been accepted for his thesis project. (Many of the poems in this volume were to appear in West of Your City in 1960.) Behind them the Staffords left the yeasty environment of graduate school; particularly he found the poetry workshop "always within a syllable or two of something overwhelming." We witness the sociability of the Staffords in a passage from "An Interval in a Northwest Writer's Life 1950–1973" (in the William Stafford special issue of Northwest Review, 1973): "Herb Wilner came over to our quonset and said [Walter Van Tilburg] Clark had consented to come over for dinner, and they didn't know whether they could adequately entertain him. Clark came, and late, late–far into the morning hours–he was telling his wonderful tales, relaxed, at home."

It must have been on occasions such as this that the poet learned "that any literary work must rely for its effect on bonuses and reverberations that derive from the resonance between human beings and their total experience, not from that little special tangent that comes from the Literary Succession." Stafford seems to have been aware of "bonuses and reverberations," ever bending an ear to record the "tone / offered by serious separate things." His singular angle of vision, that corner of his eye from which he caught the passing scene, and his sensitized ear for western American speech, make him the poet of the home town and the family circle and the most common place of all–the "gradual grass" of the western prairie.

A cautious intellectual commitment to the primacy of the senses, to the judgment withheld until the evidence is tangible, good and evil weighed in the balance of immediate experience–these are marks of Stafford's thought. But with this hard core of native realism he combines an intuitive grasp of the infinite potential of the human soul. Stafford believes that our lives are being lived now amidst the confusion of feeling and sensations. "Your job is to find what the world is trying to be," he quotes his father in the poem "Vocation." What is nearby, what is familiar–home town shadows, his wife, his children, his house, his friends-–all these "sustained harmonious relations with people" are embraced throughout his work. These old familiarities, however, are all felt in a Staffordian manner: a new manner and a new light that may cause us to pause while our minds adjust to
Stafford's.

"From the Gradual Grass" exemplifies Stafford's manner of endowing the commonplace with an inner life, with a personality that can be dramatized. Grass becomes gradual grass. The trope, or turn of thought, thrust upon the reader here forces him to think of grass in a new sense: as existing forever, "endlessly from the world's end / promising, calling." It is promising "quiet" to the voices announcing universal destruction.

Many Stafford poems should be read at the beginning of a new day, poems like "Montana Eclogue," first published in the New Yorker in December 1966. How else may one "stop everything time brings, and freeze that one / open, great, real thing–the world's gift: day"? If we are not distracted, then perhaps we can go along with the character Logue (Logue whimsically derived from Eclogue). He is the man left behind to close down the camp in the "High Valley"–"that lonely man works for us" and "carries for us everything that we load on him, / we who have stopped indoors and let our faces / forget how storms come."Logue becomes a Montana counterpart for a Homeric hero:

but Logue, by being alone and occurring to us
carries us forward a little,
and on his way out for the year will
stand by the shore and see winter in,
the great, repeated lesson every year.
A storm bends by that shore and
one flake at a time teaches grace,
even to stone.

Stafford in his career as a poet has given us a new western myth–the man on the street, the pioneer father, mother, brother, the schoolteacher, the preacher, as they may be seen in your house, our house, or on Main Street. While they are not divinities they are surrounded by something greater than man: in western towns they abide with courage and greatness of heart. In the body of his poetry we may find the soul of the continental reaches from Iowa to Oregon. This may be his unique achievement. He has lived, loved, dreamed, grieved; he has felt the mystery of the prairie grassland, the lure of the mountains and the rivers that drain the vast open country from Council Bluffs to Astoria. He knows it firsthand; it has become a part of him.

Returning one night in 1956 over the Coast Range from teaching an extension course in Tillamook, Oregon, he came upon a dead doe beside the highway. His fingers touched her side; it was warm, "her fawn lay there waiting, / alive, still, never to be born." And in the red glow of the taillight he "thought hard for us all." He "could hear the wilderness listen." "Traveling Through the Dark" has become Stafford's best-known poem; first published in The Hudson Review in 1960, it later became the title poem of a volume that won the National Book Award in 1966. The poet's sympathies felt in the expression "alive, still, never to be born" only heighten our apprehension of our own alienation from the wilderness. Are we victims of machinery "too big to stop, too strong to wear out"?

A living presence is spread through all nature in Stafford's poetry. Mountains, rivers, rocks, trees–all are clothed with a veil of mystery; all speak out in his verse. His ear records many voices of the wilderness heard under the big sky of Montana and Wyoming, in the forests of the Cascade Mountains, and in the meadow of his summer home at Indian Ford in eastern Oregon. The latter is the setting for one of the poet's finest lyrics, "Sleeping on the Sisters Land." The country home he built sits on a wild acreage with pines, juniper, native grasses, and willows along the water course, and the plain stretching miles and miles to the horizon while in the opposite direction, west and south, gleaming white Cascade peaks–The Three Sisters–rise. Sleeping under the sky, watching the stars' slow turning and awakening at daybreak with filtered sunlight on one's face–to these Stafford adds a touch that distinguishes so much of his verse, intensely personal without intruding sentimentality. The whole poem develops from one line: "Rain touches your face just at daylight." The title has to be invoked to picture the awakening out of doors on the "Sisters land":

and the world revolves into gray so bright
that a glance like love falls deep
toward the dreams that you left.

It is not surprising that with his mind-set Stafford should develop an affinity for American Indians. "Report to Crazy Horse" is a dramatic monologue evoking a prayerful moment when the speaker, a young Indian (Stafford's assumed persona), tells how he salutes the white man's flag: "All of our promises, / our generous sayings to each other, our / honorable intentions" he affirms. At these times he feels like shutting his eyes and "joining a religious / colony at prayer in the gray dawn." And the young Indian concludes, "I tell you straight / the way it is now, and it is our way": that the chokecherries in their valley still bear fruit and there is good pottery clay in "our valley," and that he remembers "our old places." For the young narrator, earth and sky and the "old grooves in the rock" are still the reliable truths.

Stafford holds in loving memory his own childhood lived on the vanishing midwestern frontier. "Plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code. / We sang hymns in the house; the roof was near God" ("One Home"). What Pope said about ten low words creeping in one dull line was written before Stafford set "Plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code" resonating in our ears to remind us of Milton's "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd Saints." Then there is the recollection of the girl who sang in the choir: "Persons came near in those days."

The family circle of mother, father, brother, and sister plays an important role in his poems. "In a large portion of Stafford's poetry . . . the spirit of his father is invoked very much as if he were a scriptural figure," D. Nathan Sumner has pointed out in "The Poetry of William Stafford: Nature, Time, and Father." Earl Ingersol Stafford, the poet's father, was a versatile person; at one time he was a trouble shooter for the Bell Telephone Company; later he became an auditor for Rosier Oil Company of Hutchinson, Kansas, the town where his son William was born on January 17, 1914. He also worked for El Dorado Refinery. Several removals took the family from Hutchinson to Wichita to Junction City and to Liberal, Kansas, where the poet spent his high school senior year. On his graduation day the town was struck by a tornado–an event commemorated in "Before the Big Storm." This poem, by the way, is an example of Stafford's use of juxtaposition and surrealistic imagery. These Kansas towns coalesce, merge into one another when Stafford recalls "Our Town." "Serving with Gideon" gives us a poet's view of the adolescent life that was evangelical in tone but tempered by the intellectual enlightenment fostered by the city library, where Stafford was a frequent visitor.

With such human sympathies, Stafford invests the western scene and the western manner with universal meaning. In the grandstand of the rodeo he sees "suffering faces," and beside the embers of his campfire among the firs he hears an owl's cry, and the night sound "struck a nerve"; he cries out:

My voice went echoing, inventing response
around the world for all our greatest need,
the longest arc, toward Friend, from All Alone.
For that brief tenure my old faith
sang again along the bone.

("A Bridge Begins in the Trees")

These references demonstrate that in spite of his identification with numerous local scenes from Kansas to Oregon, Stafford's poetry is not parochial. In images he establishes the local setting–Main Street, the church spire, the bunkhouse, the kitchen–all vivid particulars that he has lived with. From these he projects his message outward to the major intellectual concerns, philosophical, religious, political, or aesthetic, of the contemporary world. In the poem "For You Walt Whitman" the message is carried by a lichen on a stone. This later poem (1979) contradicts the confidence of the "Gradual Grass." Stafford now sees a storm coming, threatening the world we are "standing on."

Frequently, when confronted with the meanness of contemporary mores, Stafford turns to satire. His manner becomes deceptive, soft-spoken, yet it hits hard. One line in "Religion Back Home" disposes of the old beliefs: "When God's parachute failed," sometime in the spring of 1945, "we all sailed easily" into our jet age; the minister smoked, he wore spats, "and there was that woman in the choir." The shock of this poem hits us when we see the loss of faith equated with the loss of decorum: "Our Father Who art in Heaven / can lick their Father Who art in Heaven."

Satire is a weapon that Stafford uses when he confronts the ironic predicament of the intellectual in the 1940s and 1950s. The satirical thrusts in "The Poets' Annual Indigence Report" are not relieved by laughter, but rather they lay bare the pretensions of "your thinkers." "Adults Only" has its didactic side ("But we have to witness for ourselves what comes to us"), yet we may hear with an amused detachment of the wild woman who danced at the state fair, "when that woman came farming right out of her clothes, / by God." "A Documentary from America" hits the mindlessness of TV audiences without a smile. "At the Chairman's Housewarming," ridiculing academic stuffiness, is a comedy of manners: the poet smiles at "whatever they said," and his talk "poured out on the table and died in the sugar bowl." In "A Visit Home" he laughs at his own posturing and swagger: "In my sixties I will buy a hat / and wear it as my father did." He, the poet, remembering how his father was cheated there in 1929, will return and the slant of his hat will symbolize his triumph, while at the same time it will be a deft caricature.

Those who have heard Stafford read his verse may best judge his humor. A good example is his casual, low-key reading of "The Star in the Hills," in which the dialogue between the police guard, who "took the oath," and the poet is filled with innuendo, heightened when Stafford reads it assuming the role of the innocent poet.

Like many satirists aware of dishonesty, cant, and meanness, Stafford feels a strong kinship with all human destiny and its inevitable confrontation with the unknown. Death is not euphemistically treated. Of his father's death, memorialized in "Elegy," he wrote: "When you left our house that night and went falling / into that ocean, a message came: silence." In this poem, he remembers walking westward with his father over the "cornfield farms drowned in August." He also remembers the sound of his father's voice coming to him from another room and the recollection prompts him to write: "If only once in all those years, / the right goodby could have been said!"

When he wrote "Some Evening," which appears in Stories That Could Be True (1977), he had acquired, like Dante, a synoptic view of suffering:

You happy beings, watch every face for those
you pass caught in the midst of life
by some horror, their souls gone dim, cursed
or unlucky, exiled under a stone.

This kind of witness to grief and concomitant shame appears again in "Con fessor" in the 1982 collection A Glass Face in the Rain. While it may be uncomplicated in its structure, it does probe profoundly the feeling of brotherhood with fellow human beings who "have felt singled out by some blow." As he reads their distress and their shame in their demeanor, he assumes, as a sacred duty, their burdens:

All right. I listen. My life sinks a little
farther, for the pity; from now on I know it
with them. We'll take a stand, wherever the end is.
We go forward by this quiet sharing,
they one way, I another. I am their promise:
no one else is going to know.

How much of the poet's feeling for the dignity of free souls and how much of his stoical perspective on cosmic forces dates from his four-year service as a conscientious objector? A few days after Pearl Harbor he was drafted in Lawrence, Kansas, where he was a student at the University of Kansas. After an appeal to the draft board, he was classified 4E; he was assigned to conservation and forest service camps for the duration of the war.

Down in My Heart (1947), a collection of essays on the life in these camps, reports Stafford's experience without polemical pretense: quietly he shared his fate with others, realizing their common alienation from conventional society. The work reveals how much Stafford owes to men like Lennie, one of his companions in camp, who when asked by a ranger why he wasn't in the army replied: "Do you have two hours to give to that question? Well, then, forget it–I'm tired trying to set right in two minutes what the radio and the papers and movies have been setting wrong for years."

Two years before the war ended Stafford met Dorothy Hope Frantz when she came with her father to visit at Los Prietos camp. Her father was the minister of the Church of the Brethren in Glendale, California. They were married in 1944, and are the parents of four children.

The Staffords enjoy their children; poems grew out of what the poet would call their "resonances." The pulse of the family finds expression in "At Our Home," published in Allegiances. Coming home late he finds one lamp turned low; he checks every child's room, hears the "slow, sure breath–" then:

Suddenly in this doorway where I stand
in this house I see this place again,
this time the night as quiet, the house
all well secured, all breath but mine borne
gently on the air–
And where I stand, no one.

Here a moment of insight embraces love and death.

Stafford's verses are so tightly woven that his technical skills may go unnoticed while we examine his message, smile at his wit, or catch a breath with surprise as we read. "My poetry is essentially courteous–but not tame." This line epitomizes so much of his poetry: quiet, courteous, but not tame. It is offhand, not poetic-standing alone it is prose; it is the antithetical afterthought that gives the line poetic tone: "My poetry is essentially courteous–but not tame." We can be sure that this structuring, this accuracy of ear for casual rhythms of speech patterns, is the mark of craftsmanship.

He sees the process of writing as a sequential unfolding of a heightened consciousness. In Writing the Australian Crawl he tells us how he composed "The Woman at Banff":

First–the simple piece of writing. Doodling around one morning, I found myself with the aimless clause "While she was talking." This set of words led me to add to it, by a natural dogpaddling impulse, a closure for the construction; I wanted to have something be happening–just anything. I put down "a bear happened along." I remembered the bears we had seen at Banff– swaggering bears, dangerous and advertised as such, but valued. They were violent, or potentially so; they were protected by law. I began to put together phrases from that trip to Banff from that set of impressions; the result was a poem.

It is the last line of that poem that Stafford savors: the moose had "faded off winterward, / Up toward the Saskatchewan," and he savors it for what he calls its "rich offering of syllables in Saskatchewan." Writing the Australian Crawl, published in 1979, discloses how thoroughly Stafford understands his own art. Dramatic monologue may be Stafford's major stylistic device for engaging his reader or audience. In these monologues the pronoun I (Stafford's persona) subsumes the various stances of the poet: the witness to the event, the amused bystander, questioner, "thinking hard for us all." He also speaks as the archetypal father-son-brother figure. Stafford's readers or audiences frequently are directly addressed as you and a dramatic I-you exchange becomes the energizing force in the poem. But most frequently he assumes the role of the thoughtful observer.

Like many of his contemporary fellow poets, Stafford gives us the intensified point in time–the moment sharpened, highlighted, following the manner of William Carlos Williams. Richard Eberhart's clam diggers "caught in a moment of time" serve as well as Dr. Williams's little sparrows that "hop ingenuously / about pavement / quarreling / with sharp voices." These sharply etched scenes seize a moment of breathtaking compassion; another good example is Roethke's "Meadow Mouse": having eaten his three kinds of cheese, he lies in the corner of an old shoe box, "his tail curled under him, his belly big / as his head; his bat-like ears / twitching, tilting toward the least sound."

Many such rich moments occur in Stafford's verse. There is the poem about the old dog who could not "get up even when I rattled her pan. / I helped her into the yard, but she stumbled." A second glance at this may convince one of the economy of phrase by which it is achieved. Another example is found in "Blackbirds," a lovely lyric imbued with the feeling of flight as shared by migrating birds (the birds tell it as they fly over): "by miles it grandly / came below the edge of our wings," while they were "borne up by thousands of songs / from throats of Northland birds."

One of his later poems exemplifies psychological probing of states of consciousness. "Watching a Storm" is here reprinted from In the Clock of Reason:

Clouds the ocean dreams come
around us, a long, slow dance–
Babar's cousins across the West.
A thought behind, rain comes
with wind slow through space
to touch our house where nothing holds.
You come slow into a room
that your presence makes. I turn around.
The clouds turn with me, tug the sky.
Put out your hand. Help me stay.

The heart of this poem is the last line: "Put out your hand. Help me stay." It is a kind of anguished cry from a person watching an approaching storm–storm clouds and wind have translated him into space; he appeals, "Help me stay." The scene is pictured by Nancy Craig, the illustrator. In her drawing, lines of force create a vortex of wind and cloud (clouds in elephantine shapes). A human figure, hair flying, muscles tensed, hands outstretched, anxiety in his face, floats in space with a moon or planet swirling in the void behind him. The drawing and the poem reinforce each other.

Retaining something of a child's intuitive vision enables Stafford to project himself into the mysterious adventures of the human psyche. A child's thought is free to wonder, to make believe. With artistic sophistication Stafford does the same. "The Animal That Drank Up Sound," shows us how, "In all the wilderness around he / drained the rustle from the leaves into the mountainside / and folded a quilt over the rocks," and all was silence until spring came again and a cricket tried its voice, and water splashed, and a bird screamed. With this kind of seeing and hearing William Stafford has lived in the West, listening, hoping, believing, giving to each living thing its due and receiving gifts in return, such as a message from a lichen on a stone.

Stafford's campus lectures have reached generations of young poets and poetry lovers. The lecture circuit takes him to campuses in almost every state. He tells us, "I crisscrossed the nation many, many times, from east to west and from north to south." In 1972, sponsored by the United States Information Agency, he read his poetry and discussed American literature with university students in Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Egypt, and Iran.

The honors he has earned as poet and teacher Stafford wears comfortably like an old coat. While serving as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1970–71) and living in Virginia he wrote home to Oregon: "Our family are buoyantly taking in the East. We do what scurrying around we can, in order to exploit this time in the Big Time." To their Lake Oswego home the Staffords returned after their term of service in Washington, D.C. Tom McCall, then Oregon's governor, named Stafford Poet Laureate of Oregon in 1974. In 1976 he was awarded an Honorary Life Membership in the Western Literature Association.

Since this time Stafford's career has been uninterrupted: he says, "there are no days when I can't write."In 1977 Stories That Could Be True was published; Things That Happen Where There Aren't Any People came out in 1980; Sometimes Like a Legend in 1981 and A Glass Face in the Rain in 1982.

Things That Happen is a collection of thirty poems focusing on the theme of an impersonal universe and what man does about it in order to live. In this book all rocks are sacred:

Mornings a shaft of light pauses to read
a stone beside a mountain path high
beyond the snow. I left it there one day,
climbing alone–for one who once was with me.
Dismissed after a glance, ignored by the dawn wind,
that shelter for my thoughts is my abiding friend:
no one now can find it, and only the sun reads
those erased years and the name I know.

In this same collection appears "An Address to the Vacationers at Cape Lookout." It warns the vacationers that "The whole weight of the ocean smashes on rock," and "this place is too real for that blame / people pin on each other, for honor or dishonor." This poem cancels our illusion about ultimate human destiny; it tells us our world is "spinning in cold space" where the one "gift" to mankind is

to be able to walk away, not writhe in regret
or twist in the torture bush. After all
there is such a thing as justice in friendship.

Here in these lines is the summation of Stafford's humanism: creeds and philosophies, social and political ideologies–all the dogmas that divide the tribes of mankind–these lies that people pin on each other for "honor or dishonor," are superficial in the light of "justice in friendship." And, after all this is said, here we stand, in a "world that spins in cold space" to contemplate our mortality, to go forward sharing our humanness.

J. R USSELL R OBERTS , S R ., Pacific University

Selected Bibliography
Primary Sources
All About Light. Athens, Ohio: Croissant Company, 1978.
Allegiances. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
Around You, Your House and a Catechism. Knotting, England: Sceptre Press, 1979. "At Home on Earth."
Hudson Review 23 (Autumn 1970): 481–491.
Braided Apart: Poems by Kim Robert and William Stafford. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1976.
The Design on the Oriole. Hurdle Mills, North Carolina: Night Heron Press, 1977.
Down in My Heart. Elgin, Ill. : Brethren Publishing House, 1948. Reprinted 1971.
Friends to This Ground: A Statement for Readers, Teachers and Writers of Literature. Champaign, Ill. : National Council of Teachers of English, 1967.
A Glass Face in the Rain. New York: Harper & Row, 1982.
Going Places: Poems by William Stafford. Reno: West Coast Poetry Review, 1975.
In the the Clock of Reason. Victoria, B.C.: Soft Press, 1973.
Listening Deep. Great Barrington, Mass.: Penmaen Press, 1984.
Poems by Ghalib. New York: Hudson Review, 1969.
The Quiet Land. New York: Nadja, 1979.
The Rescued Year. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
Roving Across Fields: A Conversation with William Stafford. Edited by Thom Tammaro. Daleville, Indiana: Barnwood Press, 1983.
Segues: A Correspondence in Poetry. With Marvin Bell. Boston: Godine, 1983.
Smoke's Way: Poems by William Stafford. Port Townsend, Wash.: Graywolf Press, 1978.
Someday, Maybe. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.
Sometimes Like a Legend. Port Townsend, Wash. : Copper Canyon Press, 1981.
Stories That Could Be True: New and Collected Poems. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.
Temporary Facts. Athens, Ohio: Duane Schneider, 1970.
Things That Happen Where There Aren't Any People: Poems. Brockport, New York: BOA Editions, 1980.
Traveling Through the Dark. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
Tuft by Puff. Mount Horeb, Misc.: Perishable Press Limited, 1978.
Tuned in Late One Night. Dublin: Gallery Press; Deerfield, Mass.: Deerfield Press, 1978.
Two About Music. Knotting, England: Sceptre Press, 1978.
Two Lectures: Leftovers; A Care Package. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1973.
West of Your City: Poems by William Stafford. Los Gatos, California: Talisman Press, 1960.
William Stafford: Eleven Untitled Poems. Mt. Horeb, Wisc.: Perishable Press Limited, 1968.
"The World as a Metaphor." In The Achievement of Brother Antoninus, edited by William Everson. Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1967.
Writing the Australian Crawl. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978.
Secondary Sources
Bayes, Ronald H., and Sam Ragan, eds. Special edition on William Stafford, The St. Andrews Review 2 (Fall/Winter 1972). Quotes Stafford on the state of American letters, the elements of time and place in his poetry, and his preference for the work of Robert Lowell and Richard Wilbur.
Bunge, Nancy. "William Stafford: An Interview by Nancy Bunge." American Poetry Review 10 (November/December 1981): 8–11. Stafford tells how he conducts a class in poetry writing and explicates his poem "Accountability."
Davison, Peter. "The New Poetry." Atlantic Monthly 210 (November 1962): 85–88. Here is an early recognition of Stafford's promise of becoming a poet of "major status."
Dickey, James. Babel to Byzantium: Poets and Poetry Now. New York: Octagon Books, 1979. Quotes "The Well Rising" as an example of Stafford's natural mode of speech.
Dickinson-Brown, Roger. "The Wise, the Dull, the Bewildered: What Happens in William Stafford." Modern Poetry Studies 6 (Spring 1975): 30–38. Asserts a thesis that overlooks insights other authorities find inherent in Stafford's poems.
Ellsworth, Peter. "A Conversation with Stafford." Chicago Review 30 (1978/79): 94–100. The craft of poetry and the duties of the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress are two of the several topics covered here.
Engle, Paul, and Joseph Langland, eds. Poet's Choice. New York: The Dial Press, 1962. Stafford discusses "The Farm on the Great Plains" as his favorite poem.
Hall, Donald, and Robert Pack, eds. New Poets of England and America (Second Selection). New York: World Publishing Company, 1962. Includes Stafford.
Haskell, Dennis. "The Modern American Poetry of Deep Image." Southern Review 12 (1979): 137–166. This suggests that the poetry of Robert Bly, Donald Hall, W. S. Merwin, Louis Simpson, William Stafford, and James Wright forms a body of new American poetry best defined as "poetry of the deep image."
Hoffman, Daniel. "Poetry: Schools of Dissidents." Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, edited by Daniel Hoffman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. Surveys Stafford's career as a poet and relates him to the contemporary American poetry scene, appraises and explicates selected poems.
Holden, Jonathon. The Mark to Turn: A Reading of William Stafford's Poetry. Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 1976. From an informed critical perspective the author here sets forth the recondite meaning of Stafford's metaphor.
Howard, Richard. Alone with America: Essays of the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950. New York: Atheneum, 1980. Calls Stafford "our Widsith of the Great West."
Hugo, Richard. "Problems with Landscapes in Early Stafford Poems." Kansas Quarterly 2 (Spring 1970): 33–38. Finds Stafford more at home in the Midwest plains than with the landscapes of the Northwest.
Kizer, Carolyn. "Poetry of the Fifties in America." In International Literary Annual No. 1, edited by John Wain. London: J. Calder, 1958. Finding "many countries of the mind" in American poetry, the author places Stafford among the younger writers of the time; with a photograph and quotations from "With My Crowbar Key" and "Star in the Hills."
Lauber, John. "World's Guest–William Stafford." Iowa Review 5 (Spring 1974): 88–101. Reviews The Rescued Year, Allegiances and Traveling Through the Dark.
Lensing, George S.,and Ronald Moran. Four Poets and the Emotive Imagination: Robert Bly, James Wright, Louis Simpson, and William Stafford. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. Examples bring into focus rhetorical terms that characterize this kind of poetry: juxtaposition, irony, paradox.
Lensing, George S. "William Stafford, Mythmaker." Modern Poetry Studies 6 (Spring 1975): 1–17. Points to Stafford's "poetry of understatement," and his calm, even-tempered manner as a cause for some readers to overlook his real worth as a mythmaker.

Lofsness, Cynthia. "An Interview with William Stafford." Iowa Review 3 (Summer 1972): 92–107. Includes Stafford's appraisal of Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Robinson Jeffers, Robert Lowell, and Theodore Roethke.
Miller, Tom P. "In Dear Detail, by Ideal Light: The Poetry of William Stafford." Southwest Review 56 (Autumn 1971): 341–345. Also reprinted in Contempo rary 4 (1973). Recounts what Stafford told students at Southern Methodist University to help them into a "new open-eared relationship to poetry."
Milton, John. "From Artifact to Intuition in Great Plains Writing." Prairie Schooner 55 (Spring/Summer 1981): 131–140. Shows the importance of things-in themselves in frontier environment and "Great Plains" literature: includes Stafford's Allegiances. Pirie, James W. William Stafford: A Primary Bibliography, 1942–1979. New York: Garland, 1981. Setting out to acquire a copy of every publication of a Stafford poem or of works about him, the author accumulated the collection that be came the source of this bibliography.
Quinn, Sister Bernetta. Review of Stafford's Allegiances. Poetry 118 (August 1971): 288–290. Declares that "Each lyric by Stafford is an event" and "Death is everywhere in Stafford."
Ramsey, Jarold. "The Indian Literature of Oregon." In Perspectives: Essays on the Culture of the Pacific Northwest, edited by Edwin R. Bingham and Glen A. Love. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979. Cites Stafford's poem "Well Rising" as an expression of the western American Indian reverence for the earth.

Ramsey, Paul. "What the Light Struck." Tennessee Poetry Journal (Spring 1969): 17–20. Comments on Stafford's prosody, his wit, his humor and narrative skill.
Roberts, J. Russell. "Listening to the Wilderness with William Stafford." Western American Literature 3 (Fall 1968): 217–226. Explicates "Some Shadows" and "Traveling Through the Dark." Has been reprinted in The Literature of the American West, edited by J. Golden Taylor.
Shapiro, Janet D. "William E. Stafford: Consultant in Poetry in English to the Library of Congress." Special Libraries 61 (September 1970): 353–6. Quotes Stafford's one-line parody:
"The New Family from Chicago"
Their cat comes on little fog feet.

Stepanchev, Stephen. American Poetry Since 1945: A Critical Survey. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Calls Stafford a poet of "Existential loneliness and Western space."
Sumner, D. Nathan. "The Poetry of William Stafford: Nature, Time, and Father." Washington State University Research Studies 36 (1968). Compares Sylvia Plath's father image with the scriptural figure of his father depicted by Stafford.
Turner, Alberta T., ed. Fifty Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process. New York: Longman, 1977. Quotes Stafford's poem "Ask Me" and his explication of its composition: "my entry into the process was through inward satisfactions I felt as the language led me onward."
Wagner, Linda W. "William Stafford's Plain Style." Modern Poetry Studies 6 (Spring 1975): 19–30. Discusses the elements of the "plain style" that contribute to Stafford's impact as a poet and to his stance of responsibility.
Venn, George. "Continuity in Northwest Literature." In Northwest Perspectives: Es-says on the Culture of the Pacific Northwest, edited by Edwin R. Bingham and Glen A. Love. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979. Relates Stafford's poetry to major themes in Northwest literature, especially the theme of traveling through unknown territory in search of "sacred space as it is found in the Journals of Lewis and Clark."

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