Ann Stanford

Ann Stanford Poems

Ann Stanford Biography

Ann Stanford (November 25, 1916, La Habra, California – July 12, 1987) was an American poet. She graduated from Stanford University in 1938 Phi Beta Kappa, and University of California, Los Angeles, with an M.A. in journalism in 1958, an M.A. in English in 1961, and a Ph.D. in English and American literature in 1962. Stanford married Roland Arthur White, an architect, in 1942, and they had three daughters and one son. When she died in 1987, at the age of seventy, Ann Stanford was at the apex of a long and distinguished career as a poet, translator, editor, scholar and teacher. Over a period of forty years, she had written eight volumes of poetry, two verse plays, and a book-length study of the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet. She had also translated the classic Sanskrit text The Bhagavad Gita and edited The Women Poets in English, an anthology that gathered, for the first time, hundreds of years of poetry by women. Her poems had appeared regularly in the most prestigious journals and magazines—the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The New Republic, The Southern Review—and had been widely honored.)

The Best Poem Of Ann Stanford

The Fountain

You must remember never to offend the gods
by being too sure of anything.
Think of Niobe, how she grew in pride
watching her seven tall sons and seven fair daughters.

Who would not? Having created such
superb heads set on the pure column
of the neck, the long hair glistening in the sun
and their voices musical as water

in a bright stream rippling over rocks -
the archer, the runner, the studious,
the orator, the weaver, the gatherer of garlands,
one with his horse, another at the lyre.

Wherever she looked she saw the gold
limbs of her children, strong
in the sun, their laughter
beyond the sounds of the strings, even the chords

Orpheus struck before he lost his bride
before he disobeyed the charge of Hades
and looked back into the dark
where Arachne in a still corner wove

over and over the stories of the gods
and their offenses, how Hades caught
Persephone, and Leto's son
killed one by one the children of Niobe.

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