Peers Praise Her Talent : Poet Ann Stanford Dies; Taught 25 Years at CSUN

Ann Stanford, whose poetry won numerous honors and who was regarded by her peers as one of the more gifted practitioners of the art, has died in Los Angeles, it was reported Friday. She was 70.

Miss Stanford, the author of eight volumes of poetry and of a book on the life of Anne Bradstreet, America’s first recognized woman poet, recently retired after more than 25 years as a professor of English at California State University, Northridge.

She died Sunday of cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

‘Compassion and Warmth’

Fellow Los Angeles poet Harry Northrup once said Miss Stanford’s work had “the lucidity of any early, cold morning” to which she added “great compassion and warmth.” He praised her sense of classic form and called her “one of America’s best poets.”

Miss Stanford told a Times interviewer in 1982: “To be widely published and win awards is very ego-gratifying, but not much more. It doesn’t really mean anything financially, except, perhaps, that when I retire I can start taking some visiting professorships around the country.”

Poetry, she observed, “is like chamber music, only maybe even a little more obscure.”

Nevertheless, her poems appeared in such magazines as the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly and Poetry. In addition to her nine poetry volumes and her 1957 study of Anne Bradstreet (“The Worldly Puritan: An Introduction to her Poetry”), Miss Stanford produced dozens of monographs and numerous poetry reviews (many of which appeared in The Times). She was known as a poet who could write on a wide variety of subjects, with a talent for imagery and narrative.

Learned Sanskrit

She once learned Sanskrit in order to translate “The Bhagavad Gita,” an epic of western India.

A resident of Benedict Canyon, Miss Stanford customarily arose at 6 a.m. each day and walked to her nearby studio to write poetry in longhand. “If I don’t go down there to the study,” she said, “I am at a loss for the rest of the day.” But sometimes, she admitted, “I just look at the paper, waiting, waiting. . . . “

Miss Stanford was born in La Habra on Nov. 25, 1916. She attended Fullerton High School and Stanford University, where she graduated in 1938 with a pre-law degree. But she decided that she was too shy to be a lawyer. Instead, she accepted a Phelan Fellowship to compose an epic poem about explorer Ferdinand Magellan and study part time at Radcliffe College.

Eventually, she attended UCLA, where she earned master’s degrees in journalism and English, then a doctorate in English. She taught journalism for several years there, then joined the faculty of Cal State Northridge in 1962.

A Feeling for Nature

She said she remained there for 25 years because she had no desire to move on. She felt that staying in Southern California helped give her a feeling for nature, one of her qualities so admired by other poets.

“The East Coast goes for more arty writing,” she said, “whereas the West Coast goes for more openness and understanding. They (in the East) are penned inside six months a year, going to art galleries and concerts, whereas I can go out and cut weeds or work in my garden or whatever.”

She served as poetry consultant to the Huntington Library, to which she has bequeathed her manuscripts, papers and extensive poetry library.

Among her volumes were “In Narrow Bound,” (1943); “The White Bird” (1949); “The Weathercock,” (1956), and “In Mediterranean Air,” (1977).

She was the recipient of--among other prizes--the Shelley Memorial Award in 1969, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Literature in 1972 and two silver medals for poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California.

An example of Miss Stanford’s work:

I am says the bulldozer

singing brighter than the birds

a thousand birds on a thousand branches

sing no merrier than I

and the crickets’ alas

the brittle scraping

of a million legs together

or the bellowing of frogs.

I am and send my weighty message

over the hills at daybreak

breaking hills

I am stronger than the mountain.

I push up the knotted roots of sycamores

a hundred summers gathering.

I shake the sunflowers

where the spotted eggs are hiding.

I stamp down this terrace.

I descend

to the Pleistocene. This was a lake

then rock. I make it a meadow.

No ages for me. An afternoon is enough.

I am says the bulldozer

and compassed round with music.

Her husband, architect Ronald Arthur White, died six years ago.

She leaves daughters Rosanna Norton, of Venice; Pat Osika, of Sunnyvale, and Suzy White, of Kula, Hawaii. She also leaves a son, Bruce White, of Beverly Hills, as well as three grandchildren.

Memorial services will be conducted next Saturday at 1 p.m. in the Church of the Hills, Forest Lawn Memorial-Park, Hollywood Hills. The family asked that, in lieu of flowers, gifts be made to the Ann Stanford Fund at Huntington Library in San Marino.