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William Stafford (1914-1993)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=228

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on William Stafford including a biography, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/stafford/stafford.htm

This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on William Stafford.

BIOGRAPHY

Born in Hutchinson, Kansas to Ruby Mayher and Earl Ingersoll Stafford, William Stafford grew up in a working-class family and graduated from high school in 1933 during the middle of the Depression era. After passing through two junior colleges, Stafford earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Kansas in 1937. Over the next three years, he studied for a master's degree in English but World War II cut short his graduate education. As a conscientious objector to the war, Stafford spent four years from 1942 through 1946 doing community service in such areas as soil conservation, fire fighting, road maintenance, and other forms of manual labor in Arkansas, California, and Illinois. During this period, in California he married Dorothy Frantz in 1944. After the war, Stafford taught high school and worked for the Church World Service before earning his master's degree from the University of Kansas in 1947. That year, the poet's memoir of his war experience as a conscientious objector, Down in My Heart, was published by Brethren Publishing House. The next year Stafford moved to Portland, Oregon to accept a teaching position at Lewis and Clark College where he would remain for the rest of his professional career until 1980. In 1954, he earned a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. Stafford's first volume of verse, Traveling Through the Dark, was not published until the poet was forty-eight, but it won him the National Book Award in 1963. Other awards followed, including the Award in Literature by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Western States Lifetime Achievement Award, among numerous other prizes. In 1970, he served as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Before his death at the age of 79 in 1993, he had published more than sixty-five volumes of poetry including such volumes as The Rescued Year (1966), Stories That Could Be True: New and Collected Poems (1977), Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer's Vocation (1978), and An Oregon Message (1987).

SECONDARY SOURCES

Andrews, Tom, Ed. On William Stafford: The Worth of Local Things. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.

Capps, Donald. The Poet's Gift: Toward the Renewal of Pastoral Care. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993.

Carpenter, David A. William Stafford. Boise: Boise State University Press, 1986.

Holden, Jonathan. The Mark to Turn: A Reading of William Stafford's Poetry. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1976.

Kitchen, Judith. Understanding William Stafford. Columbia, SC: South Carolina University Press, 1989.

—. Writing the World: Understanding William Stafford. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1999.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER