Pacifism in William Stafford’s Poetry

	Pacifism in William Stafford’s Poetry
Alustath
Article 1, Volume 2, Issue 207, 2018, Pages 37-60
Abstract
In an age that reinforces a culture of war and faith in military violence as means to resolve social and political conflicts, William Edgar Stafford (1914 – 1993), National Book Award winner and poet Laureate, stands as a prolific pacifist American poet whose both life and anti-war poetry carried a diligent endeavor to articulate a vision of a ‘beloved community’. From World War II until his death in 1993, his conviction of peace remained solid and his belief in the futility of wars did not change. A Conscientious Objector, Stafford registered himself as a pacifist along with Robert Lowell (1917-1977) and William Everson (1912-1994), the civilian poets who played an essential role in shaping and representing American anti-war poetry of World War II. He knew that he could not stop war but through his art he sought to implement a culture of peace, a new home, a universe of human fellowship whose members choose to preserve life rather than put an end to it and restore the image of a land that bombing destroyed. Throughout his fifty-year literary career, he advocated pacifism and consistently argued that it is crucial to act independently when violence rules and to speak for reconciliation when nations fight. How Stafford confronted and defied a history of the so-called inevitable wars, the powers of modernism, militarism, and war propaganda as well as the traditional portrayal of the bitter-beauty horror of war within his pacifist poetics is the basic question this paper tends to answer. Whether he was a starry-eyed idealist or a realist in arguing for strife free nation is another question to be answered.

Statistics Article View: 178 PDF Download: 80