William Edgar Stafford was born in Hutchinson, Kansas on January 17, 1914.  He was the oldest of three children born to Earl Ingersoll and Ruby Mayher Stafford.  His was a highly literate family, with a shared appreciation for nature and books.

Professor of English and one of the most widely recognized and admired of American poets, William lived an ordinary life, his collected poems a journal of daily concerns.

While in El Dorado, the Staffords lived first at 1125 W. 3rd Avenue, and later moved to 603 N. Topeka.  William at this time attended the junior college in El Dorado, having transferred from a junior college in Garden City, Kansas.  He had graduated from high school in Liberal, Kansas in 1933.

In 1937, he earned a Bachelor of Art degree in English at the University of Kansas.  He began graduate studies in 1939 at the University of Wisconsin in Economics, but returned to KU the following year to work towards a master’s in English.

Stafford was drafted into the United States armed forces in 1941, before he could obtain his degree.  Because of strongly felt religious beliefs, he became a conscientious objector.  As a registered pacifist, he was required to perform alternative service from 1942 to 1946 in the Civilian Public Service camps, consisting of forestry work, soil conservation, and road construction in Arkansas, California and Illinois for $2.50 per month.

Time in CPS camps was traumatic, generative and crucial to his development.  On the one hand, William found himself separated even from his neighbors and friends by his refusal to fight in a popular war.  He reflected years later on the distance his choice forced upon him: “My friends were… more antagonistic to my position (as a conscientious objector) than the general populace was… They knew me, and I had done this, and it was kind of an affront.”

Yet CPS also placed Stafford in the company of like-minded though quite diverse young men.  Separated from the militaristic fervor of their contemporaries in uniform, but isolated also from domestic life on the home front, they were free to think bold thoughts, and they schooled one another in new ways to see history and practice human behavior.

Stafford’s sense of his vocation as a poet grew directly from this experience. He learned to rise before the sun; a lifelong habit that yielded both a remarkable number of fine poems and that strangely blended sense of independence and engagement so characteristic of his work.

While working in California in 1944, he met and married Dorothy Hope Frantz, daughter of a minister of the Church of the Brethren.  They later had four children: Nancy, Kim Robert, Kris and Tommy.  Kim, a poet and essayist, is today the Literary Executor for the William Stafford Archive housed at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon.

Remembered by his children as able to fix anything – often with a rubber band – he would tune his old guitar with great ceremony, make undrinkable dandelion and blackberry wine labeled “Yum,” sneak raw garlic into food, and forever stretch and re-stretch his beloved, slouchy brown hat over a mixing bowl.  He taught his children to seek out what is unknown to them and then learn about it.

Following the war, Stafford taught one year at a high school and spent a year working for a relief organization, Church World Service.  He also finished his master’s degree at the University of Kansas in 1947. His master’s thesis, memoirs of his time spent as a conscientious objector, was published as a book of prose, Down in My Heart, in 1948.  That same year, he moved to Oregon to teach at Lewis & Clark College.  Later, in 1954, he received a Ph.D from the University of Iowa.

A lifelong pacifist, Robert was prominent in his work with such poets as Robert Bly in protesting America’s involvement in the Viet Nam War.

At the core, Dr. Stafford remained humble and gentle, unimpressed with the various awards and recognitions he later received as a poet.  He was a man whose thoughts were of the spirit but whose feet were firmly on the ground.

He once said, “Reverberations of poetic response often come from many things.  All of life is very dramatic, and writing is so free.  It is bigger than the world.”  Stafford urged freedom of expression – the willingness to “let the mind enter into nowness – things that never happened and never will be again.”

William Stafford died in Lake Oswego, Oregon on August 28, 1993, at the age of 79.  That morning he had written a poem titled ”Are You Mr. William Stafford?” It seems to offer a fitting coda to his life’s work:

          You can’t tell when strange things with meaning will happen.  I’m [still] here writing it down just the way it was.  “You don’t have to prove anything,” my mother said.  “Just be ready for what God sends.”  I listened and put my hand out in the sun again.  It was easy.

 

 

 

          Well, it was yesterday.  And the sun came,

 

          Why

 

          It came.

 

His granddaughter, Rosemary, talking with her father following Stafford’s death, said, “I don’t have to hold onto Bill and I don’t have to let him go. He’s part of me.”

 

William Stafford belonged to the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Modern Language Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the American Association of University Professors.  He was a member of the Church of the Brethren, and a lecturer on literature for the United States Information Agency in many foreign countries.  He was also a biker and photographer.  His close friend and collaborator was poet Robert Bly.