One striking feature of his career is its late start. Stafford was 48 years old when his first major collection of poetry was published, Traveling Through the Dark,[4] which won the 1963 National Book Award for Poetry.[5] The title poem is one of his best-known works. It describes encountering a recently killed doe on a mountain road. Before pushing the doe into a canyon, the narrator discovers that she was pregnant and the fawn inside is still alive.
Stafford had a quiet daily ritual of writing, and his writing focuses on the ordinary. Paul Merchant, writing in the Oregon Encyclopedia, is gentle quotidian style to Robert Frost. Merchant states, "his poems are accessible, sometimes deceptively so, with a conversational manner that is close to everyday speech. Among predecessors whom he most admired are William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson."[6] His poems are typically short, focusing on the earthy, accessible details appropriate to a specific locality. Stafford said this in a 1971 interview:
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.[7]
Stafford was a close friend and collaborator with 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."[8] He kept a daily journal for 50 years, and composed nearly 22,000 poems, of which roughly 3,000 were published.[9]
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; his tenure in the position lasted until 1990.[10] In 1980, he retired from Lewis & 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.[11]
Personal life
Stafford died at his home in Lake Oswego, Oregon on August 28, 1993. The morning of his death he had written a poem containing the lines, "'You don't have to / prove anything,' my mother said. 'Just be ready / for what God sends.'"[12][13] In 2008, the Stafford family gave William Stafford's papers, including the 20,000 pages of his daily writing, to the Special Collections Department at Lewis & Clark College.
Kim Stafford, who serves as literary executor for the Estate of William Stafford, has written a memoir, Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford (Graywolf Press).
