William Stafford
William Stafford
Prolific American poet and 1970 U.S. Poet Laureate who won the National Book Award for Traveling Through the Dark. His numerous other works include In the Clock of Reason, Brother Wind, Passwords, and Wyoming Circuit.
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth17 January 1914
CountryUnited States of America
war people soldier
Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.
dog pavlov
I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.
ocean sea shapes
The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
development definitions language
I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.
writing feelings progress
I have this feeling of wending my way or plundering through a mysterious jungle of possibilities when I am writing. This jungle has not been explored by previous writers. It never will be explored. It's endlessly varying as we progress through the experience of time. These words that occur to me come out of my relation to the language which is developing even as I am using it.
ponds lilies dies
If you purify the pond, the lilies die
giving-up real kids
My question is "when did other people give up the idea of being a poet?" You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?
language can-do
Language can do what it can’t say.
people admirable
There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
artist able may
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
writing matter no-matter-what
What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.
snow quality done
It is this impulse to change the quality of experience that I recognize as central to creation. . . . Out of all that could be done, you choose one thing. What that one thing is, nothing else can tell you--you come at it over unmarked snow.