Robert Frost
(1874–1963)
Robert Frost is regarded as a poet of New England, even though he was born in San Francisco. He was named Robert Lee in honor of the Southern general. Frost was eleven years old when his father died and his mother took her children east, settling eventually in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Frost attended Lawrence High School and was one of the two valedictorians of his class. The other was Elinor White, whom he later married. Frost studied briefly at Dartmouth College but left after less than two months. He then spent his time assisting his mother, who was a schoolteacher, and later he worked in a mill.
During the 1890s he began writing poems and sending them out for publication, but very few were accepted. His grandfather made it possible for him to attend Harvard University, but after nearly two years he left, with the knowledge that he could write poetry. By this time, he was in his middle twenties and about to become a father. At this crucial point in Frost’s life, Elinor appealed to his grandfather to buy them a farm in West Derry, New Hampshire. Frost spent ten years on this farm and arranged his schedule to accommodate his poetry, milking his cows at midnight so that he could write poems in the late evening hours.
In 1912 Frost sold his farm. An unknown poet at the age of thirty-eight, he sailed to England with his family to seek the recognition he had failed to find in America. Gradually he came to know a number of English and American poets, including Ezra Pound, and was able to arrange for the publication of his first collection, A Boy’s Will. His second book, North of Boston, published when he was forty, was widely acclaimed, and when he returned to America in 1915, he found himself an established poet.
For his subjects Frost often turned to the small farms of New England, the woods and mountains of that region, and its sturdy and self-reliant inhabitants. Readers of his work find that what begins as a description of a tuft of flowers, a bird, or the woods in a snowstorm often ends with a profound insight into life. His collections of poems appeared at rather long intervals. He wrote slowly and with great care. He sought to capture the sound of common speech in his poems. But at the same time, Frost lifted common speech to a rare and penetrating eloquence.
In his old age, Frost was honored beyond all living poets since the days of Longfellow and Whittier. He won the Pulitzer Prize four times. The United States Senate passed resolutions to commemorate his seventy-fifth and eighty-fifth birthdays. Frost was chosen to participate in the inauguration of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in January 1961. His magnificent readings brought the actual sound of his poetry to a broad audience. In an age when poetry had, on the whole, become the concern of a relatively few enthusiasts, Frost was a genuinely popular figure. He was regarded by the nation as one of its wise old men, and by the world as one of America’s greatest poets.
