William Stafford began his career as a poet on an unpopular note. He concluded his public life with an unlikely act of independence. During the Second World War, he announced that he was a conscientious objector. It was not then as fashionable to protest against mass violence as it later became during the Vietnam War. Stafford spent four years in an internment camp. This experience reinforced his pacifist convictions, together with his innate rebelliousness against establishments and governments. Nearly five decades after his confinement and postwar release, in 1989, when he had won accolades enough to be appointed Oregon's poet laureate, he announced that he would resign the position. Few poets, one may imagine, would have done anything like that, but Stafford felt uncomfortable with the idea of poets as government officials. “I’ll just keep on writing,” he said, “get it published and get it rejected.” Integrity counted more than tax- supported flattery.

What sort of integrity? This question matters, because while other poets might have had no problem with killing America's authoritarian- minded enemies and retaining at least a semblance of ethics, Stafford found any sort of violence morally revolting. Becoming an official poet was barely preferable to braining acts of self- defense. Emerson's individualist- minded muse (though Emerson was no pacifist) sang out in Stafford's best lyrics, and poetic precedents for an opposed, more bellicose view of human affairs made no impression on him. If Homer, Aristophanes and Siegfried Sassoon had taken to the battlefields of earlier wars with reluctant willingness, Stafford could more happily “bow and cross my fork and spoon” in rejection of any sort of murder. His reason, as he puts it in “Objector,” was that he wished “never to kill and call it fate.”

This idea, as moving as it is courageous and irksome (is that what soldiers actually do, call it fate?), contains some deeper ones, which lead into the heart of Stafford's poetry. There is, for instance, his idea of a universal silence, or the darkness of the title of this posthumously published collection (Stafford, who was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1914, died in 1993).