William Stafford was born in 1914 in Hutchinson, Kansas, and grew to become a great American poet who wrote over fifty books of both poetry and prose. He was also a greatly loved and admired teacher, who often told his students "lower your standards!" to keep them from judging their writing too harshly. Stafford credits his parents for teaching him to love literature—the family would "luxuriate in stories"—and for giving him confidence in his own ideas.

Stafford was a humble man, who captured the rhythms and speech of his native Kansas, and found meaning and poetry in simple things. He was not always a full-time poet, however, and in fact published his first book of poetry in 1960, when he was 47. As a young man, he worked in a sugar beet field, at an oil refinery, and for the U.S. Forest Service. He was also a worker for peace. During World War II, Stafford refused to join the army and was sent to work camps where men who refused to fight the war fought forest fires, built trails and roads, and worked on other environmental projects. Stafford's first book, Down in My Heart (1947), describes this experience. He called the book his "peace relic" because it tells of men who worked for peace during a terrible war.

During his time in the camps, Stafford began the habit of writing one poem each day, a practice he would keep up all his life. He studied at the University of Kansas and the University of Iowa. He taught and wrote here and there, settling down in 1948 as an English professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, where he would remain until his retirement in 1990. He earned the National Book Award in 1963 for his poetry collection Traveling Through the Dark. Stafford was the poet laureate for Oregon for several years prior to his death in 1993. As on every day of his life, Stafford wrote a poem on the day he died. In the poem was included the line, "Just be ready for what God sends."

Robert Frost (1874–1963), associated by most people with New England, was actually born in San Francisco. At the age of ten, following the death of his father, Frost moved with his mother to New England. He attended Dartmouth and Harvard, worked in a mill, taught school, and farmed. In 1912 he moved to England, where he worked on his poetry. After the publication of his first book at the age of forty, Frost moved back to the United States and bought a farm in New Hampshire. Over the coming years, he became America's most well-known and most beloved poet. In 1961 he was invited to read a poem at President John F. Kennedy's inauguration. Books by Frost include A Boy's Will, North of Boston, and West-Running Brook.