[A] radical faith in the power of language to implicate reality has been the religion of American poetry for at least a century…. [Recently] the American poet's trust in language has shown itself as a "letting go" of what seem to be the recognized constraints of writing: a release of potentialities that are latent in the language one sets down. This letting go produces a text that half seems to write itself, or that can be trusted to write itself in a way that dissolves or blurs the boundaries between language and its referents. The poet's role in this process is to originate it and give it contour: to let his language speak through him, as if he were a kind of modern Ion, inspired not by divine madness but by the intrinsic sanity of the word. (pp. 101-02)

As [John Ashbery, A. R. Ammons, and W. S. Merwin] show, there is no central or privileged form for the American poet's trust in language. One kind of trust, however, does seem to show itself widely, and perhaps even approximates a contemporary norm. William Stafford's volume of collected poems, Stories That Could Be True, develops it searchingly…. I am tempted to call this trust quietistic, partly because it leads to a language that does not seek to transform itself, and partly because the vision that this language supports is curiously muted in its terms of desire, even when the desire itself is intense. This mode of trust, which is sometimes simply quiet and sometimes genuinely quietist, is paradoxical by nature. Quiet trust in language is an extreme trust so strong in the intrinsic hold of language on reality that the poetic language it produces is the reverse of extreme. Simple, direct, rooted in observation, this language is free to cross the borders of common discourse, but rarely finds the need to. Poetry written with a quiet trust in language invests extraordinary power in simple statement, and understands the possibilities of complex figuration as resources which need be used only in the unusual situations in which reality proves especially evasive. The language of quiet poetry works on the world not by adding to it but by selecting from it; when the language is "let go," it defines itself as much by what it declines to do as by what it does, and is in that sense ascetic. Poetry written in this mode does not try to interpret reality, much less transform it, but simply to record or inscribe it, as if fact were the sweetest dream that the poem's labor knew. The language is as neutral as it can make itself, with a neutrality like a snapshot's, its presence a frame thrown around an event; if the event is something remarkable, so should the picture be. Meaning should be implicit in the fact, not in the word. (pp. 102-03)

The quiet in the poetry of William Stafford is the product of Stafford's poetics of desire. Like many modernist poems, Stafford's center on a moment of fruition or fulfillment, but unlike its modernist counterparts, Stafford's privileged moment is neither sublime nor transcendental; nor, for the most part, is it even epiphanic. Stafford acknowledges the appeal of the "dread and wonder" of the modernist moment, and even the necessity for tasting its "far streams," but he serenely puts it aside for a change that leaves us "safe, quiet, grateful" in common reality…. Stafford's desire selects a moment of felt integration with the land to which he belongs, which is the West; but the texture of the moment is like the strange silence that follows the cessation of a sound one was not conscious of hearing. Often retrospective, and rarely the apparent object of a desire projecting into the future, Stafford's "moment" combines a sense of peace or calm, a stillness, and a sense that the self's presence is permitted or acknowledged by presences external to it.

To record such moments, or the void left by their absence, Stafford has developed a language of radical "quiet," but also of great clarity, like a whisper without the hoarseness. (p. 104)

Stafford's poems are not written, as a rule, wholly from within a steady quiet. More often than not, the quiet is their goal, and they find it after a wandering movement in which the language moves well outside the boundaries of ordinary writing. Usually, the quiet achieved in this way focuses itself on a singularity, like the little tree: a something or someone that the poem's language recalls but does not interpret, because interpretation would be false while mere acknowledgment is in some sense true. (p. 105)

Stafford's poetry is full of moments in which the poet is instructed by others' voices, almost always remembered voices which the poet transcribes. The act of writing the voices down combines the features of celebration and recognition; sometimes, too, of translation, because the voices often come not from persons but from nature…. These voices always draw the poet close to the center of his vision, and what they say is always quiet, in the special sense I have tried to give the word. Perhaps all of Stafford's work tries to approach this moment of transcription, even when the only "voice" it involves is his own. His poetry consummates its efforts by evoking or achieving the muted, simple statement in which the special unity that he seeks appears to speak for itself, whether to tell of its arrival or departure. The language of this unity is almost painfully plain, and the poetry accommodates it by turning away from the resources of figuration—suppressing, renouncing, or muting them, as the poem's language becomes the language of its object. At its most extreme, the poem's opening into this quiet mode, this writing down of the voice of something other, turns to a genuine quietism, in which the poet's self is absorbed or dispelled…. Stafford's achievement in his chosen domain is distinctive. It is good to have his collection. A poet who insists on listening as much as "speaking," who writes down the speech of the real, is worth attending to. Yet there are serious limits here as well. Stafford's eloquent simplicities are not immune from sententiousness and sentimentality, and when his modulations into quiet are ineffective, they appear as an evasive way to find closure for the complexities his poems have wandered into. More serious than these occasional falterings, however, is the problem inherent in Stafford's very virtue: the passivity of self implied by his quietism. With few and rather splendid exceptions ("Earth Dweller," for instance), Stafford's poetry refuses the risks of high intensity, of powerful demand and powerful disappointment. Fear in him rarely becomes terror; loss shrinks from grief to nostalgia; and privileged moments are rewarding rather than exalting, soothing rather than exacting. Ultimately, the self in Stafford's work is just too small—too willing to rest in the given, too wary of desire and inner turbulence; and this makes his various submissions to otherness less significant than they should be, wonderful as many of them are. The self, perhaps, is a surplus commodity in American poetry, from Whitman and Dickinson on down, but Stafford's attempt to modulate its claims denies its energies instead of restructuring them. Even so, this is the kind of demurral that can only be made against a poet whose vision is moving enough and persuasive enough to be troubling; and Stafford is certainly that. (pp. 107-08)