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2. 51 William Stafford’s Lost Landmarks the poetics of pacifism and the limits of lyric Though William Stafford is best known for his poetry, his largely forgotten memoir of his years as a conscientious objector during the Second World War, Down in My Heart (1947), anticipates the central questions of his pacifist and utopian poetry. How to resist war in one’s writing and yet avoid the Manichean us/them discourse that perpetuates war? How to pledge allegiance to the nation and yet articulate an alternate vision of social connection —a poetics of nonviolent community? How to write a poetry which invites pacifist response, or interpellates a pacifist subjectivity? How to oppose a history of generals and wars on the level of poetic form? Down in My Heart stages the drama between Stafford’s utopian poetics—manifested in an ahistorical vision of the “beloved community,” where consensus decision making, accommodation, and respect for the law and for others are paramount—and the press of history, genocidal war, and outright resistance. Stafford’s memoir represents both a “lost connection,” to echo Robert Lowell , in the history of nonviolent literature and a landmark by which we can reorient ourselves in the poet’s massive lyric domain. The memoir is an Ur-text that informs and exposes the monological limits of Stafford’s poetry; while it anticipates Stafford’s lyric preoccupation with building an imagined community that respects—and even requires—solitude and difference, it also illuminates the horizon of Stafford’s lyric and, indeed, the limits of the lyric as genre. Brooding about Community in the Civilian Public Service Of all contemporary American poets, William Stafford “broods most about community—the ‘mutual life’ we share” (Bly Introduction xiii). Stafford’s brooding about community originates in Down in My Heart, a collection of stories that imagines and recounts the “beloved community” of conscientious objectors who performed nonviolent service for the U.S. during the Second World War. Despite its relative obscurity, Down in My Heart is perhaps the most articulate and sustained literary work to grapple with and represent war resistance during the Second World War. Both historical account and fictional representation, combining poetry and prose, Down in My Heart avoids the pitfalls of self-pity, nostalgia, or rebellious alienation as it inscribes a poetics of nonviolence. In other words, it consciously imagines itself, even as it represents Stafford’s alternative service experience in Civilian Public Service (CPS) camps, as a model of living in communal resistance to the structures of war and violence. Such a task might seem to be a doomed literary project, caught either in ahistorical utopianism or self-righteous moralism. But Stafford’s politico-literary gambit—one that may even outstrip his subsequent 60-plus volumes of poetry—succeeds precisely because the memoir remains open to, and includes, the very voice that proclaims the CPS experiment in nonviolence a failure—the voice of a “certain absolutist” named George. A brief recap of the history of the CPS experiment will illuminate how Stafford’s memoir provides a representative glimpse of pacifist action during the Second World War. In 1940, pacifist organizations had won a key victory in Congress with the passage of a law recognizing conscientious objection as a legal category; the idea of creating a civilian service program as an alternative to military service captured the imagination of pacifists throughout the country, and Stafford and other COs set out to make their lives in CPS a witness to the possibilities of nonviolent community within a nation-state at war. Their task was to “work at being a distinct society within but not removed from the larger one, at living out their convictions in the face of both natural suspicion and all the propaganda resources of our modern government” (Gundy 97). CPS brought together future Civil Rights leaders (Bayard Rustin, among others), longtime radical pacifists, and artists and writers (Stafford, William Everson, Kenneth Rexroth, and J. F. Powers). The wartime contribution of COs also was not insignificant; over six years, 12,000 COs worked eight million days fighting forest fires, battling soil erosion, building dams, planting trees, farming, raising money for war victims, working in mental hospitals, and volunteering as human guinea pigs for medical research on disease. CO William Anderson, for example, took part in medical research on the effects of starvation on human beings (see figure 1)—research that would provide data for the postwar relief effort. Despite these contributions, many COs began to see the CPS...

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