Stafford Traveling Through the Dark Essay

William Stafford, the beloved 20th century American poet, charmed his readers with his poem, “Traveling Through the Dark,” which dives into the human experience. Think about when you were in high school and your teacher told you that she had to use the restroom, leaving the room with just yourself and your test. Did you take advantage of that moment and cheat for the higher grade or did you remain honorable to yourself and continue as if she were in the room looking over your shoulder? Stafford explores

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

“Traveling through the Dark” is a poem written by William Stafford. William Stafford was born in Hutchinson, Kansas in 1914. In 1948, he moved with his wife and four children to Oregon to teach at Lewis and Clarke College. He published “Traveling through the Dark” in 1962 and won the very first book award in 1963. In 1970, Stafford was named the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, which is known as the Poet Laureate("William Stafford Archives”). He passed away in 1933from a heart attack

Profound Meaning in William Stafford's Traveling Through the Dark The power of the poet is not only to convey an everyday scene into a literary portrait of words, but also to interweave this scene into an underlying theme. The only tool the poet has to wield is the word. Through a careful placement and selection of words, the poet can hopefully make his point clear, but not blatantly obvious. Common themes of poems are life, death, or the conflicting forces thereto. This theme could never possibly

Dark Days are the Worst Days When reading poems, one is sure to notice the similarities between the topics that the authors choose to write about. Thinking about this makes sense because we are all human and the day to day challenges we face are all similar. Some topics one might be familiar with include, love, and death, two things that almost everyone can relate to in life. Two authors that focus on the topic of death are, William Stafford a male poet born in 1914, and Mary Oliver a female poet

William Stafford portrays this through his gloomy free verse poem “Traveling Through the Dark.” Throughout the poem, Stafford use of dashes give us insight into the mind of the driver and the relationship of life and death. The form and use of dashes allows the reader to explore their minds and analyze what they would do in the driver’s situation. Stafford uses form and his placement of dashes to convey the theme: the toughest decisions are often the most agonizing and challenging. “Traveling Through

Traveling through the Dark by William Stafford is essentially a short poem that was written based on personal experience. The poem starts out with an unnamed, anonymous character which is also the narrator of the poem as he tells of a haunting but sad memory in first person. The story begins by telling of how a cautious traveler in the night comes across a dying deer but with an unborn child waiting to be born. What the traveler chooses to do with the deer and her child is a conflict that will decide

I chose the poem, “traveling Through the Dark, by William Stafford. Stafford describes the speaker as traveling at night. On speaker’s way, he discovers a dead female deer on the side of the road. He stops his car and takes a look at the deer, he touches the deer’s body and finds everything except the stomach area is cold. After a while he figures, there was an alive fawn in deer’s body when he was almost ready to push her away into the canyon. The speaker hesitated for a while and then after thinking

by Maxine Kumin and “Traveling through the Dark” by William Stafford depict two similar cruel interactions with animals. Both poems feature a narrator who treats wild animals as lesser beings for the “greater good”. However, the narrators do not share the same intentions and guilt. In the end though, both speakers show that they believe they are in a position of higher value than these animals. In “Woodchucks” by Maxine Kumin and “Traveling through the Dark” by William Stafford, use of diction, imagery

“Introduction to Poetry” and “Traveling Through the Dark,” are poems written by Billy Collins and William Stafford. The poem’s, “Introduction to Poetry”, main conflict is a teacher who tries to get his students to read and appreciate a poem, but what all the students only care about is figuring out what it means. The conflict is highlighted through the many uses of metaphors to help us understand how he wants the students to look and decipher a poem and how they only focus on finding the meaning