[William Stafford] is a unique poet if there ever was one, though somewhat misunderstood, I feel, and, strangely neglected by the critics. (p. 272)

For some reason he has been accepted as a bucolic poet. This is utterly preposterous, though he digs deep into the land for analogues. He is an urbane naturalist. His touted simplicity is not simple…. He is one of the slipperiest poets around, but like seals, that's getting rare.

I like to think of him as a "family jiber" who draws things closer by testing and defining boundaries. Families need such jibers. And so does a society…. William Stafford has been doing it all with a particularly sensitive and intelligent stethoscope—himself. It is my own belief that in a steady, unobtrusive fashion, a great voice in poetry has matured, which has its own American grapple with innocence…. [Stafford] moves the reader into an underworld, full of moral shadow, rich with loss and memory, with praises for light, and the penance known as poetry. It is also the realm of a wise man (we have few in modern poetry, whose muse is Release rather than Reflection), and the wise, so rare, give us more to live with, and yet are undepletable…. (pp. 272-73)

I can't think of many moderns (other than Roethke and Thomas) who have used oxymoron as deftly as Stafford. This combination for epigrammatic effect of contradictory or incongruous words can be found in Horace, Donne, Keats, most of the metaphysical poets, and foliates in Shakespeare…. Oxymoron is not endemic to our Western rationalistic tradition—it occurs most in those authors who desire to fuse creation, who hunger for unity, and hence the poetry of mysticism abounds in oxymoron. The writer of the Cloud of Unknowing "knows" God. Although the Romantics experimented with it, it is still a rarely used device in the West, more endemic to the paradoxical mind of the Orient, and actually a staple in haiku…. [Throughout] his work, Stafford's muse is skewered with oxymoron: "target shoots," a man so "found" he can search to be "lost," "sacred crimes," a "wonderful confusion." In a not-so-comedic sense, knowing the way is "troublesome." All these are mind-twisters when first plunging into Stafford, and make for infinite challenge to the devoted reader, but may, in part, make the critics shy away. (pp. 276-77)

Early on, Stafford keynoted his task as a writer: "Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be." The world is a process toward an end only glimpsed, with a meaning that flickers, but does not stay. Yet his poetry is filled with statements of strange conviction: "Our lives are an amnesty given us"; "God is Cold."; "Love is of the earth only"; "At the end we sense / none of you, none of us—no one."; "Men should not claim, nor should they have to ask."

Why do I say "strange" conviction? Partially, because Stafford manages to praise an existence which he finds quite limited. Though it is often a harsh one, it is obvious to him "the world … is our only friend." But also—our poetic diet the past fifty years in America is not used to conviction, so much so that Auden wanted to rescind his bold plea: "We must love one another or die." Ever since Pound and Williams we have been fed, as writers and readers, "No ideas but in things" as an almost one-course meal. (pp. 278-79)

Stafford is so significant a poet—and so ignored by fashionable literati—because his poetry risks statement, again and again, and yet nicks it with an image. The prevailing mode is the converse. While many writers burrow into the laboratory, Stafford continues taking life itself seriously. One senses that he loves starting a debate, though, unnervingly at times, he leaves it. And his poems sustain a tension of a man struggling to be inside his community, when all along his personal beliefs have taken him outside.

There are pitfalls to Stafford's way of writing, and he does not seem shy about falling. He can veer into too-easy a polemic, as in "The Little Ways That Encourage Good Fortune," or, more rarely, chance sanctimony, as in "Hurt People" where he talks about, apparently, emotionally injured people as if they were foreign bodies outside his placenta. At times, he sports, in the words of Carol Jane Bangs, "aggressive humility." There is overgeneralizing occasionally, badged by a favorite adjective in his titles: "any"—"Any Time," "Any Vacation." His main stylistic fault, though, is excessive rhetoric…. (pp. 279-80)

A lot of these flaws are evident simply because Stafford puts more mediocre poems into print than, say, Richard Hugo. And yet at his best, no American poet is more haunting, or illuminating. (p. 280)

But why has Stafford been so widely appreciated (he won the National Book Award with his first book, Traveling Through the Dark) and yet somewhat neglected by critics …? I have a few guesses:

1. He is a centrist, in both theme and style. In fact, I can't think of a poet who is more at the center of things than Stafford, the way a votive flame is in the center of its holder. And as such, he is much harder to define, being in the center.

2. He is, at core, a moralist, and it is currently in vogue to think of morality as an empty word.

3. He started publishing late—first book of poems at the age of 46. By then, his poetic vision had already matured. There has been no leaping incremental changes in his work, the kind of thing critics feed on (Oh, oh! Haven't you heard? James Wright is no longer rhyming!). Also, he hasn't been able to satiate the critics' hunger for those young voices nurtured on the nitroglycerine of fame (witness Delmore Schwartz, Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath, etc.).

4. He lives, and for a long time, on the West Coast. For some reason, which probably rests between the third martini on the thirty-seventh story of the Empire State Building and a talcumed finger in the five-hundredth page of the O.E.D., writers west of the Rockies are considered: local color…. I honestly think geography plays a part in why Stafford is accepted warmly, but not greatly acclaimed.

                                           (pp. 280-81)

There is as much technically challenging about Stafford's poems, as thematically. He uses equivocation to an advantage, and milks the different nuances of a recurring word. He verbizes nouns. He loves to make an apparently intransitive verb transitive: "You think water in the river."… He has an excellent ear, and sense of metrical contrasts as well as the lilting meters many thought died with Dylan Thomas. He uses unique similes: "moonlight pouring through the trees like money." And, again, all creation seems personified.

His themes are at once simple and complex, revealed and mysterious. Like our most important contemporary writers (Beckett, Bellow, and Heller come to mind), Stafford is reinterpreting the word "hero." His brand of "hero" is a "fugitive from speed / antagonist of greatness." As a pacificist, he is alarmed at the capacity for slaughter the human race is stockpiling, and yet continually favors the wild over the dignified. He writes of ethical choice. He writes of freedom and limits, of alienation (longing) vs. belonging, of memory's role in refurbishing life, about the limits of "thinking" as well as the rescue of the imaginative act. Finally, and increasingly so, he is a poet of mortality, of death. His after-life is not peopled, nor is it transubstantiated, as in Whitman and Vosnesensky. All that is left is memory, and one prepares for it knowing he will not be doing the remembering.

And so William Stafford writes poems. He embraces "little lost orphans." He takes the near. He loves that word "near," and has written a beautiful poem to it. Because he senses, it seems, the distance and darkness of a world no closer, though on Mars. He is our Thomas Hardy, though at once more light, and more desolate, than Hardy. (pp. 282-83)