Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)

His Life:

Although Frost was a New Englander, he was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874. He was the first child of William Prescott Frost, Jr., of New Hampshire and Isabelle Moodie of Scotland. Frost's father had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, but he was also a heavy drinker who moved to California to earn a living in politics and journalism. He died when Frost was eleven, and Frost's mother moved him and his sister (born in June of 1876) to New England, working as a schoolteacher in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

By the time Frost was sixteen, he had decided to be a poet. When he graduated from Lawrence High School in 1892, he was class poet and co-valedictorian with Elinor White, the woman who would later become his wife. After high school, Frost enrolled at Dartmouth College, while Elinor attended St. Lawrence.

In 1894, the New York Independent accepted his poem, "My Butterfly," for publication. Frost was elated; not only had he received a payment of $15, but he was now convinced that he could support himself by writing.

After Elinor graduated in 1895, she took a teaching position at the school Frost's mother had started and shortly afterwards married Frost. Frost at the time worked as a teacher and reporter, publishing what little poetry could get past the stodgily Victorian editors who ruled the world of American letters. In December, 1895, he married Elinor, and in 1896 their first child, Elliot, was born. He began attending Harvard, but left after eighteen months when his second child, Lesley, was born in 1899. The following year Elliot died; the tragedy became the catalyst for the poem entitled "Home Burial" (published in North of Boston, 1914).

Because he realized the stress that their son's death had placed on the Frosts' already tense marriage, Frost's grandfather bought a farm in Derby, New Hampshire, and allowed the couple and their family to live on it. They lived on the farm from 1900 to 1909; these years were intensely creative ones for Frost. By 1907, Frost had six children and still no steady form of income beyond the annuity.

In 1912 Frost took his family to England, where he could "write and be poor without further scandal in the family."

Success Abroad

Many of the poems featured in A Boy's Will had been written during Frost's years at Derry Farm, as were the poems in his next two works, North of Boston (1914) and Mountain Interval (1916). North of Boston offered some of Frost's best work, including "After Apple-Picking" and "The Wood-Pile," while Mountain Interval featured "The Road Not Taken" and "An Old Man's Winter Night."

The Prizes

Henow had the recognition he had always craved and the income he and his family had to do without for so long.

In 1922, he received his first of four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry with his collection New Hampshire, which included "Fire and Ice," "Two Witches," and his most famous work, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

Five years later West-Running Brook appeared, again to high praise, but featuring, as did New Hampshire, individual poems with a decidedly political cast. In 1930, he received his second Pulitzer Prize for Collected Poems of Robert Frost, while in 1936 a third Pulitzer Prize was awarded for A Further Range.

In 1942, Frost received his fourth and last Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The collection this time was A Witness Tree , which included "Beech," "The Most of It," "November," and the poem he would read at Kennedy's inauguration 20 years later, "The Gift Outright."

Frost died on January 29, 1963, twenty-four days after winning the Bollingen Prize for poetry. In October, 1963, President Kennedy summed up the life of this American poet in a speech he delivered at the dedication of the Robert Frost Library in Amherst, Massachusetts: "In honoring Robert Frost," he said, "we therefore can pay honor to the deepest source of our national strength. That strength takes many forms and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant.... Our national strength matters; but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost."

His Books:

A feast for lovers of American literature-the work of our greatest poet, redesigned and relaunched for a new generation of readers.

No poet is more American than Robert Frost. From "The Road Not Taken" to "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," he refined and even defined our sense of what poetry is and what it can do. T. S. Eliot judged him "the most eminent, the most distinguished Anglo-American poet now living," and he is the only writer in history to have been awarded four Pulitzer Prizes.

The only comprehensive volume of Frost's verse available, comprising all eleven volumes of his poems, this collection has been the standard Frost compendium since its first publication in 1969.

Find out more about Robert Frost and His Poetry at these websites:

Poets.org

Poemfinder.com

His Poetry: