251“care in such a world”
Earth Home to William Stafford
he earth was my home; I would never
feel lost while it held me.” As a Kansas teenager, William Stafford (1914–1993)
biked out of town one afternoon and spent a night alone above the Cimarron
River. The slow, serene sunset, quail and coyote sounds, silence and “steady
stars,” later the sky brightening “yellow, gray, orange, and then the powerful
sun,” made for a “strange and fervent” lifelong vision. “The earth was my
home; I would never feel lost while it held me.”
Unlike another American of his generation, Robert Lowell, who dwelled on
the eastern seaboard and found his poems there, or their dominant elder T. S.
Eliot, who left Harvard for England and Europe, Stafford ’s sense of place kept
him rooted in the Midwest and Northwest. He studied in Kansas and Iowa,
then worked at soil conservation and forestry as a conscientious objector dur-
ing World War II, for $2.50 a month. “The One who said ‘No violence ’,” he
wrote from the Sierra Nevada in 1944, “Said ‘mountains’, / And they are here,
storm-violent, of stone.” After teaching high school in California, he took a
college job in Oregon, where he lived the rest of his life.
“The earth was my home.” If this seems too true to bear saying, it ’s backed by
Stafford ’s eye, ear, and voice for the down-to-earth places he dwelt in. They re-
main something other than himself, yet he stays responsive, with no agenda, no
bardic tones, no hawklike perch like Jeffers or homespun persona like Frost.
Stafford takes the Midwest as a fortunate given, a home granted but never
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