Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index William Edgar Stafford (January 17, 1914-August 28,1993) was an American poet, noted pacifist, and father of the poet and essayist Kim Stafford. A long-time resident of Oregon, he and his writings are often identified with the Pacific Northwest. He was born in Hutchinson, Kansas in 1914, the oldest of three children in a highly literate family [1]. During the Depression, his family moved from town to town in any effort to find work for his father. Stafford helped contribute to family income by delivering newspapers, working in the sugar beet fields, raising vegetables, and working as an electrian's mate.[1] In 1933, he graduated from high school in Liberal, Kansas. After attending junior college, he received a B.A. from the University of Kansas in 1937. In 1941, while in a master's program at the University of Kansas, he was drafted into the United States armed forces. As a registered pacifist, he became a conscientious objector and from 1942 to 1946, he worked in the civilian public service camps, performing forestry and soil conservation work in Arkansas, California, and Illinois for $2.50 per week. In 1944, while working in California, he met and he married Dororthy Hope Frantz with whom he later had four children. In 1947, he received a M.A. from the University of Kansas. His master's thesis, the prose memoir Down In My Heart, was published in 1948 and described his experience in the forest service camps. In 1948 he moved to Oregon to teach at Lewis and Clark College. In 1954, he received a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. One of the most striking features of his career is that he began publishing his poetry only later in life. His first major collection of poetry Travelling Through the Dark was published when he was forty-eight years old. It won the National Book Award the following year in 1963. The title poem is one of Stafford's most well known works. It describes an experience of encountering a recently killed doe on a mountain road. Before pushing the doe off into the canyon, the poet discovers that the doe was pregnant and the fawn inside the doe is still alive. Stafford was known for his quiet daily ritual of writing and his focus on the ordinary. The gentle quotidian style of his poetry has been compared to Robert Frost. His poems are typical short, focus on the earthy, accessible details appropriate to a specific locality. In a 1971 interview, Stafford said: "I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along." [1] He was also a close friend and colloborator with the poet Robert Bly. Despite his late start, he was a frequent contributor to magazines and anthologies and eventually published fifty-seven volumes of poetry. James Dickey called Stafford one of those poets "who pour out rivers of ink, all on good poems."[1] In 1970, he was named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position that is now known as Poet Laureate. In 1975, he was named Poet Laureate of Oregon. In 1980, he retired from Lewis and Clark College but continued to travel extensively and give public readings of his poetry. In 1992, he won the Western States Book Award for lifetime achievement in poetry.[1] He died in Lake Oswego, Oregon on August 28, 1993, having written a poem that morning containing the line "Be ready for what God sends." [1] Links to Stafford's Works Poems about Hutchinson, Kansas 17 poems by Stafford External sources List of Works by Year William Stafford -- Academy of American Poets Quotes about Stafford's writing style An Encounter with William Stafford by David Feela The Sacred Blur: William Stafford William Stafford Memorial Page at Graywolf Press William Stafford Collection at Lewis and Clark College Friends of William Stafford This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.