In his over 40 years of writing poetry, William Stafford touched on many of his era’s most pressing issues, including racism and the battle for civil rights, the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, the emergence of the space age, feminism, and the long-term impact of America’s fascination with technology. Yet few contemporary issues more inspired Stafford than environmentalism, with its urgent warnings about humanity’s ineffectual stewardship of nature. Stafford grew up viewing nature as a teacher and a moral guide; later, he was inspired by his large-scale government conservation work during the Vietnam War, and then by his explorations of the Pacific Northwest while on the faculty of Lewis & Clark College. Confirming Stafford’s respect for the integrity and beauty of nature, “Traveling Through the Dark” is part of the burgeoning campaign among writers in the early 1960s to speak in defense of nature.

Stafford was also drawing on ideas from the 19th century. “Traveling Through the Dark” channels Walt Whitman, a literary debt Stafford readily acknowledged. A Transcendentalist poet whose writing featured his spiritual view of nature and popularized free verse, Whitman is regarded as one of the most influential writers in the Western canon.