I came to this place, a young man green and lonely.

Well quit of the world, I framed a house of moss and timber, called it a home, and sat in the warm evenings singing to myself as a man sings when he knows there is no one to hear.

I made my bed under the shadow of leaves, and a awoke in the first snow of autumn, filled with silence.
Poem of the Forgotten, John Haines

John Haines' decision in May of 1947 to move to Alaska had a similarly decisive effect on his life and work. Like many other young men who had come early to maturity during World War II, Haines had already had wide experience in life for someone still in his early twenties. The son of a naval officer, he had grown up "more or less homeless," moving from one military base to another. He had served in the wartime U.S. Navy and afterward had attended art school. But he had never known a sense of permanence in one specific place. Unexpectedly he found a center for his life on an isolated homestead in central Alaska.

He built a cabin on a deserted hillside above the Tanana River about seventy miles southeast of Fairbanks in a spot so remote that he claimed he could walk north from his homestead "all the way to the Arctic Ocean and never cross a road or encounter a village." Living alone much of the time, Haines spent twenty-five of the next forty-two years in the Alaskan interior. In the isolated country side he had to become self-reliant largely supporting himself through hunting and trapping. "I began for the first time," he wrote thirty years later, "to make things for myself, to build shelters, to weave nets, to make sleds and harnesses, and to train animals for work. I learned to hunt, to watch, and to listen." A modern man resettle in the primal north, he had to relearn what his ancestors knew—how to live off the land.

Haines also used the solitary years to master another primitive craft—making poems. Like Jeffers he came late to artistic maturity, and his development as a writer was inseparable from his creation of a life independent of the social and economic distractions of the modern city. Both men discovered their poetic identities in solitude, meditation, and hard physical labor. Haines' isolation, however, gave him personal authenticity only at the investment of many years. He was forty-two when his first book of poems, Winter News, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1966. (His prose appeared even later; Haines was fifty-seven when his first book of essays, Living Off the Country, came out from University of Michigan Press in 1981.) Many young men, hoping to become writers, embark on romantic lives in the wilderness. But exhausted by responsibilities, unsupported by colleagues, and hungry for human society, few have the discipline to achieve their literary ambitions. Through patience, strength, and uncommon intelligence, Haines did. He is virtually unique among the significant poets of his generation in having emerges outside of either the university or an urban bohemia.

The growth of any artist's mind is ultimately private. But in Haines' case the years of silence and isolation make his development especially mysterious. While one might read his early poetry as a subjective record of the time, the most accessible account comes from his two books of essays, Living Off the Country (1981) and The Stars, the Snow, the Fire (1989). These superbly-written collections of mostly autobiographical prose reveal the importance of the dream-like solitude the empty Northern wilderness provided the author. By stepping out of the man-made rhythms of the city into the slower cycles of nature, Haines entered—perhaps unknowingly at first—a world of meditation. There are few overtly religious themes in Haines' writing, but both his poetry and prose are suffused with a sense of the sacred. What he sought in Alaska was the secular equivalent of what the early Christian hermits found in the Egyptian desert—the chance to build an authentic life sub specie aeternitatis. The synchronization with nature, the distance from the City of Man, the daily contemplation of solitary labor were all part of the spiritual discipline of the Desert Fathers. Haines may have lost the Catholicism of his childhood, but its vision of spiritual self-realization remained a guiding force in his adult life.

Normally I would not dwell on the circumstances of a living poet's background. The lives of most contemporary poets are too ordinary to shed much light on their work. But in Haines' case the connection between artist and art seems not only illumination but inevitable. Reading his prose and poetry together, one feels the complete integrity of the author's life and work (and I use "integrity" here emphasizing its Latin root, integer, which means "wholeness."). Haines' poetry is rooted in the singular existence he chose. Essentially the same intelligence and sensibility consciously created both his adult life and his work. But to say that his verse is the natural expression of his values should not imply that it lacks artistry.. The special splendor of Haines' poetry is that it honors experience without cheating literature. He mastered the craft of poetry without forgetting that art both originates in and returns to life.

    -ESSAY: The Poetry of John Haines: The introduction to New Poems: 1980-1988 by John Haines (Dana Gioia)