William Stafford as Religious Poet?

If you've followed this blog for any amount of time, you'd know I read a certain amount of religious meaning in William Stafford's poetry. This is largely due to my primary interest of study being religion for the past seven years through college and seminary. For better or worse, I tend to find religious and spiritual truths in many places within the culture I live in, especially art and language.

If you've read much of William Stafford's poetry, you may have noticed he mentions religious and spiritual themes, but they are not often the main focus of his work. Stafford grew up attending various Protestant churches, and later came under the influence of Quakerism and Anabaptism. But for most of his life he lived in Oregon, one of the most secular places in America. As far as I know, he was not highly involved in any religious institution for very long; he generally shunned institutions. But he also had a keen sensibility that allowed him to intuit many spiritual truths.

His pacifism is perhaps the best known incarnation of his religious stance. When he spoke to his draft board in World War Two, he told them he learned in church that it was wrong to kill, and he was believed to be sincere enough to perform alternative service, working for the government in manual labor camps instead of donning a uniform and picking up a gun.

A lot of attention has been paid to Stafford's writings on peace, including a collection of poems and essays, and a documentary film based upon the collection, both works entitled "Every War Has Two Losers." Interestingly enough, not much has been said about Stafford's religious and spiritual writings. Generally he is thought to have been secular, though I wonder if he fell more along the the lines of secular Christianity, that is, believing basic principles of the faith, while not making a distinction between religious and nonreligious realms of culture. He was asked in a 1993 interview with The Paris Review if he considered himself a Christian poet. Here is his response:

I might describe myself as a religious poet whose vocabulary, reference points, and surrounding culture are phrased in Christian terms. I think I would be whatever religion there was in the society around me; it’s not the local content of the religion that possesses me, but the general attitude, the way of living that recognizes more than we know.

I have begun to read critics' views on Stafford to find what others readers have found in his work that hints toward some spiritual stance, and have found that many call him a mystic but almost always qualify it by explaining that his poems are rooted in the daily world. Stafford, then, was not interested in transcending the world, but entering into it to find "more than what we know." I have also started to identify poems and essays by Stafford that say something of his religious and spiritual views. I am also interested in researching these questions in the Stafford archives in Portland, Oregon and interviewing scholars and writers who may be familiar with this aspect of his work. Possible outcomes could be an anthology of Stafford's writings on spirituality and religion with an introduction, or a book length essay. I will see what possibilities arise. For now, I will keep reading.