William Stafford's Mythopoetic Kansas
2002; Pittsburg State University; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0026-3451
Autores Tópico(s)American Literature and Culture
ResumoBORN IN HUTCHINSON in 1914, William 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 Master of Arts degree before completing 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 mythic land created by the imagination. Such Kansas prelapsarian, existing in time before what sees as man's separation or fall from the natural world. Kansas both point to this fall while they create mythology attempting to repair such rift. For Stafford, connecting with the natural, elemental past through visionary language represents moment of healing and self-fortification, even moment of moral strength. Kansas, as suggests, can make you stronger. From an early age, took notice of his native land, which had profound effect on his life and his writing, particularly his Kansas-focused poems. His Kansas poems, many collected by Denise Low with 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. Kansas of his Kansas Poems offers readers message to be heard, type of Morse code as in Happy in Sunlight where a fence wire hums for whatever there is (11). Early in his life, as 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 great, reverent (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. imagined Kansas of his becomes place to come into contact with virginal, healing land that can sustain and cherish. While many of his other address the significance of the land, his Kansas in particular offer healing vision unlike that presented elsewhere in his work. As Richard Hugo notes, Stafford's original external landscape, and (since he an honest poet) his internal one as well, Kansas ... the Kansas represented in his poems (117). As describes in Writing the Australian Crawl, much of this vision comes from his memories of his native place as wholesome and uncorrupted: Our family 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 Kansas, the land and its people seem unspoiled by the corrosive influences of the world. As Jonathan Holden points out, Stafford consciously inventing and savoring legend he would like to have had share in, 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 the particularity of his Kansas references which give his Kansas vision strength. In an interview with Sanford Pinsker collected in Writing the Australian Crawl, describes the importance of the particular references in his poems: You suggested something about using the landscape there as model for deeper meaning. …
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