Who is William Stafford?

Question

What can you tell me about his life and career as a poet.I need to know when he died what his main focase of poetry was.That type of information. I am doing a reaserch paper for a english class.So if you could please also include a works sited. Thank you very much for the help.

Answer 1

William Edgar Stafford (January 17, 1914 – August 28, 1993) was an American poet and pacifist, and the father of poet and essayist Kim Stafford. He and his writings are sometimes identified with the Pacific Northwest.

Contents [hide]
1 Life
2 Career
3 Bibliography
4 External links



[edit] Life
Stafford was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, the oldest of three children in a highly literate family. 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 electrician's mate.

He graduated from high school in the town of Liberal in 1933. After attending junior college, he received a B.A. from the University of Kansas in 1937. He was drafted into the United States armed forces in 1941, while pursuing his master's degree at the University of Kansas, when he became a conscientious objector. As a registered pacifist, he performed alternative service from 1942 to 1946 in the Civilian Public Service camps, which consisted of forestry and soil conservation work in Arkansas, California, and Illinois for $2.50 per month. While working in California in 1944, he met and he married Dororthy Hope Frantz with whom he later had four children. He received his M.A. from the University of Kansas in 1947. His master's thesis, the prose memoir Down In My Heart, was published in 1948 and described his experience in the forest service camps. That same year he moved to Oregon to teach at Lewis & Clark College. In 1954, he received a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa.


[edit] Career
One of the most striking features, of his career is that he began publishing his poetry only later in life.

He was also a close friend and collaborator 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.[2] 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." [3] His works are archived at the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis and Clark College.


[edit] Bibliography
Poetry
West of Your City. Los Gatos, Calif: Talisman Press, 1960.
Traveling Through the Dark. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.
Someday, Maybe. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.
In the Clock of Reason. Victoria, B.C.: Soft Press, 1973.
Stories That Could Be True: New and Collected Poems. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
Wyoming Circuit. Tannersville, N.Y: Tideline Press, 1980.
Roving across Fields: A Conversation and Uncollected Poems, 1942-1982. Edited by Thom Tammaro. Daleville, Ind.: Barnwood Press, 1983.
Smoke's Way: Poems from Limited Editions, 1968-1981. Port Townsend, Wash.: Graywolf Press, 1983.
Stories and Storms and Strangers. Rexburg, Idaho: Honeybrook Press, 1984.
Passwords. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
At the Bomb Testing Site. ??
Prose
Down in My Heart (memoir). 1947. Reprint. Elgin, Ill.: Brethren Publishing House; Columbia, S.C.: Bench Press, 1985.
Winterward. Ph.D., diss. University of Iowa, 1954.
Writing the Australian Crawl. Views on the Writer's Vocation (essays and reviews). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978.
You Must Revise Your Life (essays and interviews). Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press, 1986.
The Animal That Drank Up Sound (children's book, with illustrations by Debra Frasier). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.

Answer 2

You should go to the library (your school library, a public library, or an academic library) Ask about these print reference sources:

Dictionary of Literary Biography
Contemporary Literary Criticism
Poetry Criticism

The libraries might have access to Literature Resource Center, an online subscription database that includes content from those three reference books above.

You might also ask about full text journal article databases. These will have articles where Stafford's work is reviewed. Some suggestions include Academic Search Premier, Expanded Academic ASAP, General Reference Center Gold, or Wilson OmniFile.

These sources will help you get a good grade. Don't rely on the inevitable Wikipedia source someone will suggest! The librarians will also be able to suggest some sources.

Answer 3

Stafford is a poet of ordinary life. His collected poems are the journal of a man recording daily concerns. That is why his daily method of writing is relevant to his life's work. You could say that his poetry is truly quotidian: he writes it every day; it comes out of every day. And the poet of the quotidian did not find it necessary to become maudit, to follow Hart Crane to the waterfront or Baudelaire to the whorehouse or even Lowell to McLean's. He got up at six in the morning in a suburb of Portland and drained the sump.

If we attend to chronology, William Stafford is a member of the tragic generation of American poets. Stafford was born in 1914, the same year as Weldon Kees and Randall Jarrell and John Berryman, three suicides; Delmore Schwartz was born in 1913, and Robert Lowell in 1917. How wonderfully the survivor contrasts. What makes him so different? Like Lowell, Stafford was a C. O. [conscientious objector] during the Second War. Like Berryman and Kees he came from the Midwest. But Stafford is a low-church Christian far from the rhetorical Catholicism that Lowell and Berryman entertained. I suspect that his survival is related not merely to his Christianity but to his membership in a small, embattled, pacifist sect.

The poetic surface is often ordinary (not always: Stafford salutes a lost Cree inside a knife ... ) with famous dead deer in roads, with remembered loves, with fancies about wind and weather. This ordinariness doth tease us out of thought; while we are thoughtless, the second language of poetry speaks to us. Stafford has referred to an unspoken tongue that lives underneath the words of poetry. This second language is beyond the poet's control, but we can define a poet as someone who speaks it. English teachers afflicted with students who lack control over their own language - ignorant, illiterate, wordless - often assume that the best language is the most controlled and the most conscious. Not so, or not always so: poets are literate, poets control, poets command syntax and lexicon - but the best poets also write without knowing everything that they are up to, trusting in the second language's continual present hum of implication.

Answer 4

The Diary of Anne Frank, Summer of My German Soldier, Four Perfect Pebbles,there is a lot out there. Try googling some. Good luck!

Answer 5

He played C3PO the original "12 Angry Men."