William Stafford

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William Edgar Stafford (January 17, 1914-1993) was an American poet and pacifist.

He was the father of poet and essayist Kim Stafford.

In 1970, he was appointed as the twentieth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

Early life

Stafford was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, and was the oldest of three children in a highly literate family. During the Great Depression, his family moved from town to town in an attempt to find jobs for his father. Stafford contributed to family life by serving in sugar beet fields, raising potatoes, and serving as an electrician apprentice.

Stafford graduated from high school in Liberal, Kansas, in 1933. He received a B.A. after attending senior college. In 1937, I graduated from the University of Kansas. Although being drafted into the United States armed forces in 1941 while pursuing his master's degree at the University of Kansas, he declared himself a pacifist. He served in the Civilian Public Service camps from 1942 to 1946 as a registered conscient objector. The project, which included forestry and soil conservation, was conducted in Arkansas, California, and Illinois for $2.50 per month. He met and married Dorothy Hope Frantz, with whom he later had four children, in California (1944; Kim, writer; Barbara, artist). He obtained his M.A. In 1947, the University of Kansas was founded. Down In My Heart, his master's thesis, was published in 1948 and recalled his time in the forest service camps. At Chaffey Union High School, Ontario, California, he taught English from 1947-1947" to 11th graders (juniors). He went to Oregon to teach at Lewis & Clark College in the same year. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1954. Stafford served in the English department at Manchester College in Indiana, a college affiliated with the Church of the Brethren, where he received instruction during his time in Civilian Public Service. He taught at San Jose State in California for the first year (1956-57), and the following year (1956-1967) he returned to Lewis & Clark's faculty.

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Career

The late start to his career was a striking feature of his career. Traveling Through the Shadow, Stafford's first major collection of poetry, was published in 1963 National Book Award for Poetry. The title poem is one of his best-known works. It describes riding a mountain road where a recently killed doe appears. The narrator discovers she was pregnant before launching the doe into a canyon, and the fawn inside is still alive.

Stafford had a quiet daily ritual of writing, but his writing focuses on the everyday. Robert Frost has been compared to his delicate quotidian style. "His poems are easily understood, although many are deceptively so, in a conversational style similar to everyday speech," Paul Merchant writes. William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson are among his predecessors who admired them. His poems are usually short, focusing on the earthy, easily accessible information specific to a locality.

Stafford said this in a 1971 interview:

Stafford was a close friend and collaborator with poet Robert Bly. Despite his late start, he was a regular contributor to journals and anthologies, and he eventually published fifty-seven volumes of poetry. Stafford was one of those writers "who pour out rivers of ink," James Dickey wrote. He owned a daily newspaper for 50 years and wrote over 22,000 poems, of which only 3,000 were published.

He was appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1970, a position now known as Poet Laureate. He was appointed Poet Laureate of Oregon in 1975, but his tenure in the position lasted until 1990. He graduated from Lewis & Clark College in 1980, but he continued to travel extensively and give public readings of his poetry. He received the Western States Book Award in 1992 for lifetime achievement in poetry.

Stafford died in Lake Oswego, Oregon, on August 28, 1993. "You don't have to worry or prove anything" in the morning of his death,' my mother said. "Just be prepared/for what God gives." The Stafford family donated William Stafford's papers, as well as the 20,000 pages of his daily writing, to Lewis & Clark College's Special Collections Department.

Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford, written by Kim Stafford, literary executor for William Stafford's Estate (Graywolf Press).

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