William Stafford's Mythopoetic Kansas.

BORN IN HUTCHINSON in 1914, William Stafford is perhaps Kansas's most famous writer. Throughout his growing years, he lived in such Kansas places as Wichita, Liberal, Garden City, and El Dorado. He even attended the University of Kansas, where he ultimately received a Master of Arts degree before completing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Iowa. Many critics from Jonathan Holden to Judith Kitchen have noted the influence of Kansas on the life and writing of William Stafford; however, few scholars have actually sought to explain this place evoked in his writing. For Stafford, Kansas is a mythic land created by the imagination. Such a Kansas is prelapsarian, existing in a time before what Stafford sees as man's separation or fall from the natural world. Stafford's Kansas poems both point to this fall while they create a mythology attempting to repair such a rift. For Stafford, connecting with the natural, elemental past through a visionary language represents a moment of healing and self-fortification, even a moment of moral strength. Kansas, as Stafford suggests, can make you stronger.

From an early age, Stafford took notice of his native land, which had a profound effect on his life and his writing, particularly his Kansas-focused poems. His Kansas poems, many collected by Denise Low with Stafford's assistance in Kansas Poems of William Stafford, are full of allusions to Kansas myth and place from Coronado Heights to Glass Butte to the Cimarron crossing. Stafford's Kansas of his Kansas Poems offers readers a message to be heard, a type of Morse code as in "Happy in Sunlight" where "a fence wire hums for whatever there is" (11). Early in his life, as Stafford confessed in an interview with Clinton Larson, he became self-conscious of the influence of his native land:

 
   The most impressive such [religious] experience I recall was on the banks 
   of the Cimarron River in western Kansas one todd summer evening, when sky, 
   air, birdcalls, and the setting sun combined to expand the universe for me 
   and to give me the feeling of being sustained, cherished, included somehow 
   in a great, reverent story. (8) 

For Stafford, Kansas and his imagination of the land represent ways to connect and interact with something greater than the self, with "a great, reverent story." Stafford's imagined Kansas of his poems becomes a place to come into contact with a virginal, healing land that can "sustain" and "cherish." While many of his other poems address the significance of the land, his Kansas poems in particular offer a healing vision unlike that presented elsewhere in his work. As Richard Hugo notes, "Stafford's original external landscape, and (since he is an honest poet) his internal one as well, is Kansas ... the Kansas represented in his poems" (117). As Stafford describes in Writing the Australian Crawl, much of this vision comes from his memories of his native place as wholesome and uncorrupted:

 
   Our family is from Kansas.... We liked the towns and countryside, where we 
   fished, hunted, and camped along the mild, wandering streams. Our lives 
   were quiet and the land was very steady. Our teachers were good. Not till I 
   finished my BA degree at the University of Kansas and went on to graduate 
   school in another state did I ever see an adult drunk or enraged or 
   seriously menacing. (9) 

In Stafford's Kansas, the land and its people seem unspoiled by the corrosive influences of the world. As Jonathan Holden points out, "Stafford is consciously inventing and savoring a legend he would like to have had a share in, a legend about the region where he was raised" (5). Such memories of Kansas, its people and landscape, deeply affect and shape his Kansas poems.

More specifically, it is the particularity of his Kansas references which give his Kansas vision strength. In an interview with Sanford Pinsker collected in Writing the Australian Crawl, Stafford describes the importance of the particular references in his poems: "You suggested something about using the landscape there as a model for a deeper meaning. All particulars reflect something, if looked at alertly enough" (120). Stafford asks his readers to follow his "wild visioning" (32); he calls for their "attention" (42). Therefore, by focussing on the particularity of his vision presented in his Kansas poems, it …