United States Poet Laureate William Stafford was born in Kansas to an educated family who placed a high value on education and literacy. Coming of age at the height of the Great Depression, Stafford and his family, like so many others, became transients, moving from place to place trying to find work. Stafford was able to contribute by delivering newspapers, working as a farm laborer, growing the family's own vegetables, and at one point training as an electrician's apprentice.

Despite the stress and hours of labor, he was able to graduate from high school in 1933. He enrolled at the University of Kansas and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree. He then began to pursue a master's degree at the same institution, but he was drafted into the United States Army at the start of World War II. He immediately informed the Army of his pacifist beliefs and became an official conscientious objector, performing alternative service from 1942 to 1946. He was sent to work for the Civilian Public Service camps, which focused largely on forestry and soil conservation work in Arkansas, California, and Illinois. His monthly pay for such services was $2.50.

While working in California, he met Dorothy Hope Frantz. The couple later married and had four children together. Determined to complete his master's degree, Stafford returned to the University of Kansas in 1947, and was awarded the Master of Arts the same year. His master's thesis, Down in My Heart, was published in 1948. The work was a memoir detailing his experiences in the forest service. Also in 1948 he and his family moved to Oregon, where he began his teaching career at Lewis & Clark College.

Later, he returned to graduate school to complete a Ph.D. at the University of Iowa. He taught briefly at Manchester College in Indiana and at San Jose State University in California. In 1958 he returned to the faculty at Lewis & Clark. During this entire time he was also composing poetry, but he did not begin to publish in that genre until later in his life. For example, his first major collection of poetry was published when he was forty-eight years old.

Perhaps waiting until later proved wise, as the collection won the National Book Award the following year. The title poem, "Traveling Through the Dark," is one of Stafford's most famous works. The poem deals with an experience Stafford had after encountering a recently-killed doe on a road in the mountains. The doe turned out to be pregnant, and the fawn inside her was still alive. It was this focus on the unexpected within the ordinary that is a hallmark of Stafford's work.

He places an emphasis on accessibility in his poetry. Interviewed in 1971, he stated that "I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes..."