Background

Ethnicity: His mother was a Scottish immigrant, and his father descended from Nicholas Frost of Tiverton, Devon, England.

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874. His father came from prerevolutionary Maine and New Hampshire stock but hated New England because the Civil War it had supported had robbed his own father of employment in the cotton mill economy. When Frost's father graduated from Harvard in 1872, he left New England. He paused in Lewistown, to teach and married another teacher, Isabelle Moodie, a Scotswoman. They moved to San Francisco, where the elder Frost became an editor and politician. Their first child was named for the Southern hero Gen. Robert E. Lee. When Frost's father died in 1884, his will stipulated burial in New England. His wife and two children, Robert and Jeanie, went east for the funeral. Lacking funds to return to California, they settled in Salem, Massachusetts.

Education

Robert Frost graduated from Lawrence High School as a valedictorian and class poet in 1892. He then enrolled at Dartmouth College but soon left. He spent 2 years at Harvard (1897 - 1899), but again undergraduate study proved uncongenial.

Although he never graduated from college, Frost received over 40 honorary degrees, including ones from Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge universities, and was the only person to receive two honorary degrees from Dartmouth College.

Career

Frost moved from job to job, working in mills, at newspaper reporting, and at teaching, all the while writing poetry. In 1894 he sold his first poem, "My Butterfly," to the New York Independent. Overjoyed, he had two copies of a booklet of lyrics privately printed, one for his fiancée and one for himself. He delivered Elinor's copy in person but did not find her response adequate.

In 1895 Frost tried to make a career of teaching. He helped his mother run a small private school in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He tried chicken farming at Methuen, Massachusetts, and in 1900, when his nervousness was diagnosed as a forewarning of tuberculosis, he moved his poultry business to Derry, New Hampshire. In 1906 Frost was stricken with pneumonia and almost died. Once again he tried teaching, in Derry and then in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

In 1912, almost 40 and with only a few poems published, Frost sold his farm and used an annuity from his grandfather to go to England and gamble everything on poetry. The family settled on a farm in Buckinghamshire, and Frost began to write. Ezra Pound, the expatriate American poet, helped him get published in periodicals, but Frost resented Pound's excessive management.

Frost published A Boy's Will (1913), and it was well received. Though it contains some 19th-century diction, the words and rhythms are generally colloquial and subtly simple. Written in conventional rhymed stanzas and blank verse, the poems begin in delight and end in wisdom, as Frost later said poems should. They move through various subjective moods toward modest revelations. Such poems as "Into My Own," "Mowing," and "A Tuft of Flowers" convey an inclination toward nature, solitude, and meditation, toward the beauty of fact, and toward a New England individualism that acknowledges a need for love and community.

North of Boston (1914), also published in England, is more objective, made up mainly of blank verse monologues and dramatic narratives. "The Death of the Hired Man," soberly suspenseful and compassionate, with lyric moments of waiting, has more to do with the mutual understanding in a marriage than with death. "Mending Wall" is a bantering satire contrasting a tradition-bound farmer and his neighbor, a straight-faced tease. In "After Apple-picking" the picker asks quizzically whether he should settle for being plain tired or inflate his state by identifying it with the drowsiness of autumn. "Home Burial" and "A Servant of Servants" dramatize respectively a hysteria bred of loneliness and death, and the precarious sanity of a rural drudge.

North of Boston compounded the success of A Boy's Will, and the two volumes announced the two modes of Frost's best poetry, the lyric and the narrative. Although immediately established as a nature poet, he did not idealize nature. He addressed not only its loveliness but also the isolation, harshness, and anxiety its New England intimates had to endure. The reticence of his poetry, however, is not simply that of a taciturn New Englander; it restrains tremendous psychic and sexual forces, a violent and suicidal bent, and deep emotional needs that occasionally flashed out in his poetry and personal life.

Frost's place in literary tradition had also begun to clarify. His work led back to aspects of Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Yankees Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier, and to characteristics of William Wordsworth, English 18th-century meditators on landscape, John Donne, and the Latin idylls and eclogues of Theocritus and Virgil. But Frost's irony and ambiguity, his concreteness and colloquial tone, his skepticism and honesty bespoke the modern.

When the Frosts returned to America in 1915, North of Boston was a best seller. Sudden acclaim embarrassed Frost, who had always avoided crowds. He withdrew to a small farm in Franconia, New Hampshire, but financial need soon compelled him to respond to demands for readings and lectures. In 1915 and 1916 he was respectively Phi Beta Kappa poet at Tufts College and at Harvard. He conquered his shyness, developing an epigrammatic, folksy platform manner that made him one of the most popular performers in America and abroad.

From Frost's talks, his few published essays, and his poems, the outline of a poetic theory emerged. He strove for the sound of sense, for the colloquial, for a tension between the natural rhythm of speech and the basic iambic meter of English verse. He felt that the emotion that began a poem should generate a form through likenesses and contraries and lead to a clarification of experience. This was the way to spontaneity and surprise.

Mountain Interval (1916) brought together lyrics and narratives. The five dramatic lyrics of "The Hill Wife" look at a marriage dying on a solitary farm. On the other hand, "Meeting and Passing" uses a few vivid images to infuse a courtship walk with the promise of joy. The hilarious slide in "Brown's Descent" and the youthful tree-swinging of "Birches" (although its exuberance is restrained from hyperbole by "matter of fact") are countered by the deadly accident of "Out, Out—."

In 1917 Frost became one of the first poets-in-residence on an American campus. He taught at Amherst from 1917 to 1920, in 1918 receiving a master of arts, the first of many academic honors. The following year he moved his farm base to South Saftsbury, Vt. In 1920 he cofounded the Bread Loaf School of English of Middlebury College (now Bread Loaf School of English), serving there each summer as lecturer and consultant. From 1921 to 1923 he was poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan.

Frost's Selected Poems and a new volume, New Hampshire, appeared in 1923. Though the title poem does not present Frost at his best, the volume also contains such lovely lyrics as "Fire and Ice," "Nothing Gold Can Stay," and "To Earthward." In "For Once, Then Something" Frost slyly joshes critics who ask for deep, deep insights; and in the dramatic narrative "The Witch of Coös" he turns a rustic comedy into a grotesque story of adultery and murder. "Two Look at Two" dramatizes a hushed encounter between human lovers and animal lovers.

Frost returned to Amherst for 2 years in 1923 and to the University of Michigan in 1925 and then settled at Amherst in 1926. West Running Brook (1928) continued Frost's tonal variations and mingling of lyrics and narratives. The lyric "Tree at My Window" appeared along with "Acquainted with the Night," a narrative of a despairing nightwalker in a city where time is "neither right nor wrong."

Frost visited England and Paris in 1928 and published his Collected Poems in 1930. In 1934 he suffered another excruciating loss in the death of his daughter Marjorie. He returned to Harvard in 1936 and in the same year published A Further Range.

Honors, forebodings, and tragedies continued to crowd in on Frost. Because of his weak lungs, his doctor ordered him south in 1936, and thereafter he spent his winters in Florida. After his wife died of a heart attack in 1938, Frost resigned from the Amherst faculty and sold his house. That same year he was elected to the Board of Overseers of Harvard College. In 1939 his second Collected Poems appeared, and he began a 3-year stay at Harvard. In 1940 his only surviving son committed suicide.

A Witness Tree (1942) included the lyric "Happiness Makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length" and "Come In," in which the speaker prefers the guiding light of stars to the romantic dark of the woods and the song of an unseen bird. Steeple Bush (1947) contained the beautiful elegy of decay "Directive."

In 1945 Frost essayed something new in A Masque of Reason, a verse drama, too chatty for the stage. A modernization of the biblical story of Job, it is theistic and sets forth good-humoredly the Puritanic conviction that man, with his finite mind, must remain separate from God. A Masque of Mercy (1947), a companion verse drama based on the story of Jonah, has a heretical or individualistic air about it but still comes out essentially orthodox, suggesting that man with his limited knowledge must try to act justly and mercifully, for action is his salvation if it complies with God's will.

Frost's Complete Poems appeared in 1949, and in 1950 the U.S. Senate felicitated him on his seventy-fifth birthday. In 1957 he returned to England to receive doctoral degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. On his eighty-fifth birthday, the Senate again felicitated him. In 1961, at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, Frost recited "The Gift Outright," the first time a poet had honored a presidential inauguration. A final volume, In the Clearing, appeared in 1962.

On January 29, 1963, Frost died in Boston of complications following an operation. He was buried in the family plot in Old Bennington, Vermont.

Achievements

• 

  Robert Frost was the most widely admired and highly honored American poet of the 20th century. His reputation was enhanced by New Hampshire, which received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1924. That prize was also awarded to Frost’s Collected Poems in 1931 and to the collections A Further Range in 1937 and A Witness Tree in 1943.
  
  At the age of 86, Frost was honored when asked to write and recite a poem for President John F. Kennedy's 1961 inauguration. His 1916 poem, The Road Not Taken, is often read at graduation ceremonies across the United States. In 1960, Congress awarded Frost the Congressional Gold Medal. In 1962, he received Bollingen Prize.
  
  Frost’s position in American letters was cemented with the publication of North of Boston, and in the years before his death, he came to be considered the unofficial poet laureate of the United States. On his 75th birthday, the United States Senate passed a resolution in his honor which said, "His poems have helped to guide American thought and humor and wisdom, setting forth to our minds a reliable representation of ourselves and of all men." In 1955, the State of Vermont named a mountain after him in Ripton, the town of his legal residence.

Works

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• book

  • The Notebooks of Robert Frost

    (These notebooks, transcribed and presented here in their ...)

    2007
  • Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays

    (Here, based on extensive research into his manuscripts an...)

    1995
  • A Further Range

    (Above all in A Further Range Frost expresses a weariness ...)

    1936
  • West-Running Brook

    (West-Running Brook is Robert Frost's poetry book containi...)

    1923
  • Interviews with Robert Frost

    (These interviews have special importance. They present Fr...)

    1966
  • A Boy's Will 1913
  • North of Boston 1914
  • Selected Poems 1923
  • Mountain Interval 1916
  • From Snow to Snow 1936
  • Robert Frost Reads His Poetry 1957
  • Robert Frost and Sidney Cox: Forty Years of Friendship 1981
  • Family Letters of Robert and Elinor Frost 1972
  • Selected Letters of Robert Frost 1964
  • Robert Frost and John Bartlett: The Record of a Friendship 1963
  • The letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer 1963
  • A Masque of Mercy 1947
  • A Masque of Reason 1945
  • The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems 1962
  • In the Clearing 1957
  • A Collection of Poems 1930
  • The Lovely Shall Be Choosers 1933
  • The Collected Poems of Robert Frost 1939
  • A Witness Tree 1942
  • Come In and Other Poems 1943
  • Steeple Bush 1947
  • Hard Not To Be King 1951
  • Aforesaid 1954
  • You Come Too 1964

Religion

Frost's mother joined the Swedenborgian church and had him baptized in it, but he left it as an adult.

Views

Frost stands at the crossroads of 19th-century American poetry and modernism, for in his verse may be found the culmination of many 19th-century tendencies and traditions as well as parallels to the works of his 20th-century contemporaries. Taking his symbols from the public domain, Frost developed, as many critics note, an original, modern idiom and a sense of directness and economy that reflect the imagism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. Although he avoids traditional verse forms and only uses rhyme erratically, Frost is not an innovator and his technique is never experimental.

Frost’s theory of poetic composition ties him to both centuries. Like the 19th-century Romantic poets, he maintained that a poem is never a put-up job. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, homesickness, loneliness. It is never thought, to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness. Yet, working out his own version of the impersonal view of art, as Hyatt H. Waggoner observed, Frost also upheld T. S. Eliot’s idea that the man who suffers and the artist who creates are totally separate. In a 1932 letter to Sydney Cox, Frost explained his conception of poetry, "The objective idea is all I ever cared about. Most of my ideas occur in verse." To be too subjective with what an artist has managed to make objective is to come on him presumptuously and render ungraceful what he in the pain of his life had faith he had made graceful.

To accomplish such objectivity and grace, Frost took up 19th-century tools and made them new. Lawrance Thompson has explained that, according to Frost, the self-imposed restrictions of a meter in form and of coherence in content work to a poet’s advantage, they liberate him from the experimentalist’s burden, the perpetual search for new forms and alternative structures. Thus Frost, as he himself put it in "The Constant Symbol," wrote his verse regular, he never completely abandoned conventional metrical forms for free verse, as so many of his contemporaries were doing. At the same time, his adherence to meter, line length, and rhyme scheme was not an arbitrary choice. He maintained that the freshness of a poem belongs absolutely to its not having been thought out and then set to verse as the verse, in turn, might be set to music. He believed, rather, that the poem’s particular mood dictated or determined the poet’s first commitment to meter and length of the line.

Critics frequently point out that Frost complicated his problem and enriched his style by setting traditional meters against the natural rhythms of speech. Drawing his language primarily from the vernacular, he avoided artificial poetic diction by employing the accent of a soft-spoken New Englander. But what Frost achieved in his poetry was much more complex than a mere imitation of the New England farmer idiom. He wanted to restore to literature the sentence sounds that underlie the words, the vocal gesture that enhances a meaning. That is, he felt the poet’s ear must be sensitive to the voice in order to capture with the written word the significance of sound in the spoken word. Frost’s use of the New England dialect is only one aspect of his often discussed regionalism. Frost’s regionalism, critics remark, is in his realism, not in politics, he creates no picture of regional unity or sense of community. What he finds in nature is sensuous pleasure, he is also sensitive to the earth’s fertility and to man’s relationship to the soil. Yet, just as Frost is aware of the distances between one man and another, so he is also always aware of the distinction, the ultimate separateness, of nature and man.

The austere and tragic view of life that emerges in so many of Frost’s poems is modulated by his metaphysical use of detail. As Frost portrays him, a man might be alone in an ultimately indifferent universe, but he may nevertheless look to the natural world for metaphors of his own condition. Thus, in his search for meaning in the modern world, Frost focuses on those moments when the seen and the unseen, the tangible and the spiritual intersect. In this respect, he is often compared with Emily Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, in whose poetry, too, a simple fact, object, person, or event will be transfigured and take on greater mystery or significance. Such symbolic import of mundane facts informs many of Frost’s poems.

Quotations: "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."

"We love the things we love for what they are."

"Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself."

"Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired."

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."

"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, homesickness, lovesickness."

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."

"If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane."

"Freedom lies in being bold."

"The best way out is always through."

"Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it."

"Poetry is what gets lost in translation."

"I am not a teacher, but an awakener."

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."

"Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up."

"Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense."

"A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age."

"To be a poet is a condition, not a profession."

"There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fills you with so much quail shot that you can't move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies."

"I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way."

"The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected."

"Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."

"How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?"

"There is one thing more exasperating than a wife who can cook and won't, and that's a wife who can't cook and will"

"A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes."

"We ran as if to meet the moon."

"The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work."

"Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found it was ourselves."

"A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer."

Personality

Robert Frost was a man famous for contradictions, known as a cranky and egocentric personality, he once lit a wastebasket on fire on stage when the poet before him went on too long. His gravestone of Barre granite with hand-carved laurel leaves is inscribed, "I had a lover’s quarrel with the world."

Frost the poet seems like a quiet person, a loner. He had personal struggles with depression and loneliness. But, Holden reports, Frost the man would often sit up late and talk, eating apples, gossiping about everyone and everything, a little maliciously sometimes but always brilliantly and soundly. Frost liked long walks in the mountains, but he also liked sea chanteys, sports, the theatre. He liked to talk and read about scientific achievements and exploration. He had delicious indecision, reluctant normalcy, and dark energy.

Physical Characteristics: ​​​​​​​Robert Frost's tall muscular body and rugged face with its pale watchful eyes became a familiar sight; as the hair whitened, the face grew craggy, and the body thickened, those eyes remained the same.

Quotes from others about the person

• "He writes in classic meters in a way to set the teeth of all the poets of the older schools on edge; and he writes in classic meters, and uses inversions and cliches whenever he pleases, those devices so abhorred by the newest generation. He goes his own way, regardless of anyone else’s rules, and the result is a book of unusual power and sincerity." - Amy Lowell
  
  "Though his career fully spans the modern period and though it is impossible to speak of him as anything other than a modern poet, it is difficult to place him in the main tradition of modern poetry." - James M. Cox.
  
  "Frost’s poetry, unlike that of such contemporaries as Eliot, Stevens, and the later Yeats, shows no marked departure from the poetic practices of the nineteenth century." - William Van O’Connor.

Connections

Robert Frost met his future love and wife, Elinor White when they were both attending Lawrence High School. She was his co-valedictorian when they graduated in 1892. In 1894, Frost proposed to White, who was attending St. Lawrence University, but she turned him down because she first wanted to finish school. Frost then decided to leave on a trip to Virginia, and when he returned, he proposed again. By then, White had graduated from college, and she accepted. They married on the 19th of December, 1895.

Frost and White had six children together. Their first child, Elliot, was born in 1896. Daughter Lesley was born in 1899. Elliot died of cholera in 1900. After his death, Elinor gave birth to four more children, son Carol, who would commit suicide in 1940, Irma, who later developed mental illness, Marjorie, who died in her late 20s after giving birth and Elinor Bettina, who died just weeks after she was born. White, diagnosed with cancer in 1937, died in 1938. After Elinor’s death in 1938, Frost fell in love with a married woman. This passion late in life is celebrated in a love sequence in his collection The Witness Tree (1942).

Father:

William Prescott Frost, Jr.

Mother:

Isabelle Moodie

late wife:

Elinor Miriam White

Son:

Elliot Frost

Daughter:

Lesley Frost Ballantine

Son:

Carol Frost

Daughter:

Irma Frost Cone

Daughter:

Marjorie Frost Fraser

Daughter:

Elinor Bettina Frost

References

• The Art of Robert Frost The Art of Robert Frost traces the development of Frost's writing career and relevant aspects of his life.
  2012
• Robert Frost: an Introduction
  1961
• The Poetry of Robert Frost: An Analysis
  1962
• A Swinger of Birches: A Portrait of Robert Frost
  1957
• Human Values in the Poetry of Robert Frost: A Study of a Poet's Convictions
  1960
• Robert Frost: The Ethics of Ambiguity
  2002
• The Dimensions of Robert Frost
  1958
• The Robert Frost Encyclopedia Included in this volume are hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries on Frost's life and writings. Each of his collected poems is treated in a separate entry, and the book additionally includes entries on such topics as his public speeches, various colleges and universities with which he was associated, the honors that he won, his biographers, films about him, poets, and others whom he knew, and similar items.
  2001