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William Edgar Stafford's Traveling Through The Dark

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William Edgar Stafford was born in Hutchinson, Kansas in 1914. He lived in Garden City, Liberal and El Dorado. After graduating from Liberal High School, he attended and graduated from the University of Kansas in 1947 earning a master’s degree in English. After leaving his native Kansas, he lived in Oregon for 45 years and taught for more than 30 years at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. During his lifetime, Stafford published more than 60 collections of poetry and prose assuming the position as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1970. Although he left Kansas, Stafford is considered Kansas most famous writer. Stafford’s first major collection of poems was Traveling Through the Dark, published when he was 48 years …show more content…

The speaker’s tone is one of fear and regret. On the first stanza, Stafford emphasizes the fact that each person should always speak up his or her mind. The speaker emphasizes for the reader to keep in mind that you will regret it, if you do not speak up. For this, the speaker uses a metaphor on the third stanza, “And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,” to encourage the reader not to be part of an “elephants parade,” in which no one gets anywhere. The elephants represent the people who follow others blindly. In other words, no one should consider blindly following others unless first you speak up your mind, so they know who you are and you know who they are. To highlight the poem’s message, the speaker uses the line “For it is important that awake people be awake.” In other words, for the reader to be aware or conscious of the need to know others before you decide to follow them or you will be lost with them. He hopes to inspire people to develop a community like Hutchinson where he was born, wherein people create a “golden thread” of support for each other because they know each other. He believes that by speaking up, getting to know and listening to each other any town will become a great community like his community in the small town of Hutchinson, Kansas. Certainly, Stafford expresses his affection and pledges his allegiance to his native …show more content…

Although, it seems the state of Kansas was the center of his writing, his father appears as a character in his poems and his mother presence and behavior influenced his writing. He loved to write about his father, Kansas people, Kansas landscape and his mother mainly utilizing the imagery to personally connect with the reader. Stafford could not deny the influence of his native Kansas and the plains region on his writing. Thus, all the Kansas poems he wrote pledging allegiance to Kansas becoming the Kansas most famous

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