Next year—Gods and Muses, Graces and Fates willing—William Stafford will quietly turn 70…. And it's about time to ask: is there a more exemplary poet among us?…

William Stafford has produced a stream of steady lyrics. There is no stylish violence about them: they are calm, alert, ruminative poems, spoken sotto voce. They may address so-called clichés and abstractions, like "love" or "truth," but in a self-effacing, unegotistical fashion: their method is exploratory, not declamatory. Stafford knows his place in the order of things, knows his "Vocation," in the title of an early poem, whose last line summarizes his entire enterprise: "Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be." (p. 88)

Like his other volumes, [A Glass Face in the Rain] marks no surprising or gratuitous shift in direction for Stafford's poetry: it simply continues the conversation left off in Stories That Could Be True: New and Collected Poems five years before. Stafford can be startling, but in ways indigenous to the poetry and the world, not by importing a sensational new mask to wear. Some people, regarding Stafford's single-minded if prolific lyricism, might find a redundant monotony where others see constancy and fidelity. And some people, with a glance toward [Robert Penn] Warren's generic diversity, might mark this characteristic as evidence of Stafford's limitations, and file him under "minor poet." But Stafford, a man disdainful of literary posterity, would probably only shrug and point to "that one / open, great, real thing—the world's gift: day." (p. 89)

A Glass Face in the Rain contributes more details to the map of Stafford's mid-western poems, which are (by turns and all at once) comic, grieving, bitter, nostalgic, philosophic, and matter-of-fact…. [There is] an edge in Stafford's work—besides the technical edge: he began as a poet proficient in traditional form, and can still cut a subtle quatrain or sonnet in A Glass Face in the Rain—that many people miss. True, his poems are generally peaceful and welcoming to the world's influence; but the messages they send are not naively affirmative. There is a threatening darkness within him, surrounding him: throughout his work he returns to the verge of an abyss, sometimes apocalyptic, sometimes psychological, sometimes (and most awfully) only natural. "Suppose this happens," a poem ends: "The world looks / tame, but might go wild, any time." (p. 90)

Is there a more exemplary poet among us? I don't think so. One doesn't have to choose between Stafford and Warren, of course: those are false alternatives. But they are useful extremes. Warren, with his novelistic flair, constantly and self-consciously dramatizes the relationship between himself and the world. Stafford rocks back on his haunches and lets the world come to him, wrestling with it not for mastery but merely for understanding. Warren paints huge, operatic, highly-charged Frederic Church landscapes; Stafford fills sketch-books with hundreds of watercolor studies, remarkable in their uninsistent vision, but never bothering to work them up into a sublime canvas…. [He] interposes no apparent intellectual veils between himself and the poem, or between his poem and the reader or hearer: no time for those games, "just being is a big enough job," the one great virtue. (p. 91)