Stafford's poems reveal thematically a singular and unified preoccupation. The voice of his work speaks from a sheltered vista of calm and steady deliberation. The speaker looks backward to a western childhood world that is joyous and at times edenic, even as he gazes with suspicion and some sense of peril upon the state of modern American society. The crux of each volume by Stafford involves the search for that earlier age identifiable by certain spiritual values associated with the wilderness, values which can sustain him and his family as well as the whole of the technological and urban society which surrounds him. The means to this search come through a poetry of images, images frequently and profoundly mythic. (p. 178)

The setting of Stafford's poetry is western, ranging from Kansas, the state of his birth and boyhood, to Oregon, where he has taught for more than two decades. As a result, Stafford's outdoor world is a landscape of nature writ large: there is the wind of poems like "Tornado" and "Before the Big Storm" and the sky of "Holding the Sky." His preferred world is "The Farm on the Great Plains," as one poem has it, or "At Cove on the Crooked River." In almost every case, the descriptive imagery accompanying these poems discloses a deeply human value symbolically inherent in the landscape. It is, in short, a setting ideally suitable to the poetry of the Emotive Imagination and one markedly distinct from the more midwestern settings of Bly and Wright. If a lyric by Robert Bly is likely to be set in a snowy Minnesota corn field, for example, one by Stafford will be located on the side of a mountain or along a riverbank. The setting is partially accountable for a distinction in the tone of the given lyric. There is less of the soft effusiveness one is likely to find, for example, in a poem by James Wright. As Stafford says in "The Preacher at the Corner," "Unavoidable / hills have made me stern, determined not to be wavery." Another quality that forestalls the "waveryness" of Stafford's poetry is his relative adherence to regular and formal metrical and stanzaic patterns.

The qualities which Stafford shares with the other poets of the Emotive Imagination, however, are basic. Although the poem itself more often speaks through the first person plural in a Stafford poem than the first person singular, the poet's activity is often solitary. Stafford's use of the collective "we" universalizes his own experiences. While the drama underlying the poem may originate in the external world, it can dart inward with sharp abruptness. The inward propulsion of the poem also follows upon the juxtaposition of images. (p. 179)

Stafford's affinities with and contribution to the poetry of the Emotive Imagination … [involve] both theme and technique. In its larger context, his poetry is essentially Janus-faced: it looks back with nostalgia upon an idealized childhood, but never at a removal from a far more foreboding perspective of modern society. His poetry seeks to chart the connectives between these two worlds. What, then, is the relation between such a thematic preoccupation and the Emotive Imagination? It is precisely in the way by which the poetic imagination seeks to link up the two perspectives. The childhood world is extolled through images of the wilderness; the validity of that world and the accessibility of its values are revealed through a poetry of distinctly archetypal images….

Perhaps William Stafford is equaled only by Theodore Roethke among American poets who cherish the memory of childhood. Stafford goes beyond even Roethke, however, in defining the father as the central occupant of that near-perfect world. If for Dylan Thomas the childhood eden of "Fern Hill" finds him "honoured among foxes and pheasants" and "prince of the apple towns," Stafford's eden is appreciably simpler: "Plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code." The Kansas boyhood of Stafford, marking an epoch of American life between the two wars, is rural, austere, inhabited by companionable neighbors and dominated by family. Its value for Stafford, though, is more than sentimental. It ultimately represents a way of life that forcibly contradicts the urban world of the 1960s and '70s. Its moral precepts derive directly from an intimate familiarity with the land and the wilderness…. (p. 184)

The mythic quality of the childhood world is dominated by the figure of the father who appears in dozens of Stafford's poems…. The father who appears in the poems is heroic: he is provider and protector; his moral strength is steady and independent of worldly expectations; most important of all, he is the high priest of the wilderness. Like Sam Fathers to Isaac McCaslin or Natty Bumppo to the neophytes of the frontier, Stafford's father is initiator and instructor to the son, not only in relation to the wilderness itself, but in the moral values which inhere within it. (p. 187)

Another character-type who corresponds to the father in the poetry of Stafford is the American Indian. Like the father, the Indians and their chiefs are dead; and their wisdom also derives from intimacy with the wilderness. They too impart their wisdom, heroically purchased, to their survivors through the agency of the poem….

The qualities by which the Indian is most consistently defined are not ferocity and warfare, but reticence and concealment, an insight common to the Indian poems of both Wright and [Louis] Simpson. His life is enacted according to rituals and symbolic patterns which bring him into harmony with the wilderness. He is marked by his withdrawal, both imposed and preferred, from the predator-settlers. (p. 192)

["Returned to Say"] illustrates a tenet which underlies all of Stafford's Indian poems: most of the Indians have been violently removed; their pattern of life, adherent to the values of the wilderness, remains a richly attractive alternative to contemporary society. (pp. 193-94)

The childhood world, for all its mythic import, is past, and "the rescued year" is saved from oblivion only through the language of poetry. Family and friends of youth have departed; the Indian civilizations of the past are reduced to captive feebleness. The values by which that lost world existed, however, remain possible; they are indeed a desperately prescribed remedy in the face of perils which Stafford sees on every side. The nature of those perils occupies a major portion of Stafford's canon as a poet. The precarious world in which the poet finds himself is described through three principal categories. The first is composed of the dangers of the wilderness and nature itself, dangers that existed as much in the past as in the present, though they seem more acute now. The second category is made up of specific descriptions of modern, technological society. The poems here are concerned with the threats of nuclear war, of a ravaging industrial society, and of a mechanical existence that divorces the individual from authentic human values. Finally, some poems form a category which exposes the sham and vapidity of modern social behavior.

It is important to note that in the last two instances Stafford is presenting the reader with an impression of modern society that is diametrically opposed to the idealized world of childhood. The two worlds, in fact, stand almost irreconcilably apart. Finally, it is the vocation of the poet to discover the means by which the two poles can be brought together so that modern society can be redeemed. That will only occur, however, by the unequivocal embrace of the ethos which informed the life of the western boyhood of Stafford.

Although many of his poems suggest that Stafford's view of the childhood world is innocently utopian, this vision does not hold universally. The same resources of the wilderness which nourish the happiest human existence also disclose a kind of Darwinian struggle wherein predation and decay lurk. "With One Launched Look," "Chickens and Weasel Killed," "Love the Butcher Bird Lurks Everywhere" are poems which, as their titles suggest, betray the inhospitable in nature. A fundamental lesson of the nature world is that all life is defined by insecurity and transitoriness. (pp. 194-95)

Being alert and cautious affords some protection against the natural disasters of the world. In any case, human volition is relatively helpless in correcting the aberrances themselves. The same cannot be said for the more ominous threats that emerge in Stafford's verse. These are humanly invented and humanly imposed.

Of special concern to Stafford are those means of technology that endanger the wilderness. It is a theme to which he returns in every volume. "They have killed the river and built a dam," he asserts in "The Fish Counter at Bonneville." Oil well engines have outlasted the vigilance of the snakes in "Boom Town." Especially in "Quiet Town" the ironic silence and reserve of the community only thinly cover various acts of delinquency: "Technicians in suicide plan courses / in high school for as long as it takes." The automobile graveyard is taken as a symbol of contemporary standards for succeeding generations in "Time": "The river was choked with old Chevies and Fords. / And that was the day the world ended."

In poems such as these Stafford shares with Bly, Wright, and Simpson a distrust and disavowal of much of what he finds in modern society. Unlike these poets, however, Stafford's appraisal of that scene is not so much founded upon the disparity between the wealthy and the poor, or between unscrupulous capitalists and ostracized misfits. Rather, it is the rapacious destruction of the natural world, the environment of all men, that most perplexes him. (p. 196)

The poetry of Stafford has been thematically examined up to this point in terms of two poles. The first is the idealized world of childhood…. The second pole fixes firmly upon the present world which surrounds Stafford's adult life. It is seen almost exclusively in terms of fretful risk. The mechanized state of modern society which has forced the removal of man from his intimate identity with the land and nature is not only a threat to the continuation of the wilderness itself but insidiously reduces the terms of human existence to debilitating distortions and artificialities.

There is finally, however, a third state in the poetry of Stafford which is posited upon the kind of life the poet has attempted to stake for himself and his family. It is to some degree a romantic world which entails, necessarily, a partial retreat from the other and larger society which encloses him. But as a world of retreat it is not one of illusion. In the final analysis, the entire thrust of Stafford's work taken as a whole is toward the disclosure of a life that seeks to recapture the values of that other elusive and boyhood world. Consequently, these poems refuse to submit to the inflictions against the wilderness—both physical and spiritual. Rather, they are poems of desperate retrenchment.

The image in which Stafford casts himself in these poems is, to some extent, that of an isolated, sometimes lonely, advocate…. It should be remembered, though, that Stafford's thematic conservatism in these poems does not emerge out of ignorance or insensitivity to the compelling issues of the larger world. To the contrary, he suggests that some form of retreat is finally the only remedy with which he can address those issues. The poems of what one might call the "modern wilderness" are calculated on Stafford's part to this end.

A major premise of these poems is that one's moral choices that lead to personal happiness depend integrally on the location of where one lives. Geography is the primary ingredient of personal gratification. In this sense, Stafford's poetry is as regionalist as that of southern poets like James Dickey…. All of these poems offer an alternative to an America where lives are marked by mobility, rootlessness, and insulation from the soil. Stafford is most overtly didactic on precisely this point: "One's duty: to find a place / that grows from his part of the world," or "The earth says have a place, be what that place / requires." A second criterion is a kind of burrowing in once the individual has found that location, a stubborn resolution to hold fast to one's chosen land. In "A Story," the poem's speaker observes mysterious climbers whose objectives are unknown: "they crawl far before they die." His own response is the opposite: "I make my hole the deepest one / this high on the mountainside." Another requirement is isolation. The secrets of the wilderness are divulged only to the one who removes himself from civilization. The "apparition river" of "By the Snake River" is lost when the poet "went / among the people to be one of them." Especially the spiritual life of nature is discernible only when "The railroad dies by a yellow depot, / town falls away toward a muddy creek." Finally, the fruits of the wilderness can never be discovered by rational chartings. "You thinkers, prisoners of what will work," are disavowed by Stafford in "An Epiphany" as he describes a brief and almost mystical encounter with a dog "in quick unthought." Such revelations are spontaneous, fleeting, and granted at moments when least expected.

The method of the Emotive Imagination is most apparent in the poems of the modern wilderness when Stafford seeks to define its concealed meanings. The deepest life of nature is revealed only rarely and under conditions outlined above. Even so, Stafford suggests an ambivalence in presenting the accessibility of those meanings. Glimpses (a favorite Stafford word) are possible; and, at times, a profound linking between the human and the nonhuman natural world occurs. On the other hand, Stafford occasionally suggests that the boundaries between the two worlds are impenetrable, and the imposition of the human is a tainting activity. (pp. 201-04)

The upshot of Stafford's poetry of the modern wilderness is a reaffirmation of American life in the twentieth century. It is true that poems like "At the Bomb Testing Site," "A Documentary from America," "Traveling through the Dark," and others remind us of the tenuous and imperiled state of that life. At times a meager stoicism seems the best resort: "Today we have to stand in absolute rain / and face whatever comes from God." Stafford's poetry epitomizes the quality of the Emotive Imagination—that for all its romanticism, this poetry will not take refuge in illusions or pretensions about the state of modern society. Part of his confidence in the future is founded upon the miraculous ability of the wilderness, independent of any human agency, to renew itself. It is this of which he speaks in "A Pippa Lilted": "It will be soon; / good things will happen." Or, the acceptance of the unheroic and unexalted in human nature, an honest perspective, allows "a pretty good world" in "Adults Only." Most important of all, however, and that which underlies Stafford's continued didacticism, is the faith that the life he once enjoyed upon the Kansas wilderness and the one he seeks to reclaim upon the modern wilderness is still dynamic and accessible. (p. 215)