Robert Frost

Anyone asking who was Robert Frost usually pictures a New England farmer poet, yet he began life about as far from Vermont as an American could get. Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874, the son of William Prescott Frost Jr., a journalist with Southern sympathies who named the boy after Robert E. Lee, and Isabelle Moodie, a Scottish-born teacher ^[1]. His father worked for San Francisco newspapers and dabbled in Democratic politics before dying of tuberculosis in 1885, when Robert was eleven ^[2].

The death left the family nearly penniless. Isabelle moved with Robert and his younger sister Jeanie across the country to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where his paternal grandfather worked as a mill overseer. The relocation planted Frost in the New England landscape that would supply the material for nearly all of his mature work ^[1]. He attended Lawrence High School, where he published his first poem in the school bulletin and graduated in 1892 as co-valedictorian alongside Elinor Miriam White, the classmate he would later marry ^[2].

Frost enrolled at Dartmouth College in the fall of 1892 but left before completing a single term. He drifted through a string of jobs in Lawrence: helping his mother teach school, delivering newspapers, and working in a mill trimming carbon filaments for arc lamps ^[3]. In 1894 he sold his first professional poem, "My Butterfly: An Elegy," to the New York Independent for fifteen dollars, an early sign that writing might pay, though decades would pass before it paid reliably ^[1].

Frost married Elinor White in December 1895, and from 1897 to 1899 he studied at Harvard as a special student without taking a degree ^[2]. In 1900 his grandfather bought the young family a farm in Derry, New Hampshire. Frost raised poultry there for nine years with limited commercial success, but the Derry years proved decisive for his art. Early mornings and late nights at the kitchen table produced drafts of many poems that would appear in his first books, and the farm's stone walls, orchards, and hired men entered his imagination permanently ^[3].

From 1906 to 1911 he taught English at Pinkerton Academy in Derry, then briefly at the New Hampshire State Normal School in Plymouth. American magazine editors, however, kept rejecting his poems. In 1912, at 38, Frost made a gamble that reshaped his life: he sold the farm and moved his wife and four children to England, reasoning that London publishers might be more receptive to his work ^[1].

The gamble paid off quickly. The small London firm of David Nutt issued A Boy's Will in 1913 and North of Boston in 1914, and both collections drew serious critical attention ^[2]. In England Frost befriended the poet Edward Thomas, whose walks with Frost through the Gloucestershire countryside are often linked to the origins of "The Road Not Taken," and he met Ezra Pound, who reviewed his first book favorably for American readers ^[4]. When the First World War drove the family home in 1915, Frost arrived to find that Henry Holt had published North of Boston in New York and that he was suddenly a poet with a reputation ^[1].

Any account of Robert Frost achievements begins with the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, which he won four times: for New Hampshire in 1924, Collected Poems in 1931, A Further Range in 1937, and A Witness Tree in 1943. No other poet has won the award that often ^[5]. The books behind those prizes contain much of the small canon of American poems that general readers actually know by heart: "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Mending Wall," "Birches," "Fire and Ice," and "The Road Not Taken" ^[2].

Frost's technical achievement was to fit the rhythms of ordinary New England speech inside traditional meter and rhyme. He called the effect "the sound of sense," the idea that the tone of a sentence carries meaning even before the words are understood ^[3]. At a time when modernists such as Pound and T. S. Eliot were breaking verse forms apart, Frost famously remarked that writing free verse was like playing tennis with the net down, and he kept the net up for fifty years ^[4]. Beneath the accessible surfaces, critics from Randall Jarrell onward have found darker matter: isolation, grief, and indifference in nature, qualities that separate Frost facts from the folksy image ^[6].

Honors accumulated at a pace few American writers have matched. Frost collected more than 40 honorary degrees, including doctorates from Oxford and Cambridge on a single 1957 trip to Britain ^[1]. In 1960 Congress voted him a gold medal in recognition of his poetry, presented in 1962 ^[5]. He also worked steadily as a pedagogue, holding long associations with Amherst College, the University of Michigan, and Dartmouth, and co-founding the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference tradition at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he taught nearly every summer from the 1920s until his death ^[3].

The private history behind the public poet was marked by repeated loss. Robert and Elinor Frost had six children. Their first son, Elliott, died of cholera in 1900 at age three, and a daughter, Elinor Bettina, died days after birth in 1907. Daughter Marjorie died in 1934 of puerperal fever after childbirth, and son Carol died by suicide in 1940 ^[2]. Frost's sister Jeanie was committed to a state mental hospital in 1920, and his daughter Irma was later institutionalized as well; Frost feared mental instability ran in the family ^[6].

Elinor, his first reader and the anchor of his household for more than four decades, died of heart failure in 1938. Her death staggered Frost, and in the years that followed, Kathleen Morrison, the wife of Harvard critic Theodore Morrison, became his secretary and manager, imposing order on his lecture schedule and correspondence for the rest of his life ^[6].

Despite the sorrows, Frost was a tireless public performer. He gave hundreds of readings, which he preferred to call "sayings," charming audiences with wit and a carefully cultivated Yankee persona. Farms remained part of his identity long after he stopped depending on them; he kept properties in Franconia and Derry, New Hampshire, and later the Homer Noble Farm in Ripton, Vermont, near Bread Loaf ^[3].

Old age brought Frost a level of public standing no American poet has held since. From 1958 to 1959 he served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the post now called Poet Laureate of the United States ^[5]. His 85th birthday dinner in 1959 made news when the critic Lionel Trilling toasted him as a "terrifying poet," a phrase that sparked debate but captured the bleakness serious readers had long detected in his work ^[6].

The most visible moment came on January 20, 1961, when Frost, then 86, took part in John F. Kennedy's inauguration, the first poet to read at a presidential swearing-in. Glare from sun and snow made the typescript of his new poem "Dedication" unreadable at the podium, so Frost instead recited "The Gift Outright" from memory, an improvisation that became one of the era's defining public images ^[7].

In August 1962, at the request of the Kennedy administration, Frost traveled to the Soviet Union on a goodwill visit and met Premier Nikita Khrushchev ^[7]. Late that year his health failed. After surgery and a series of embolisms, Robert Frost died in Boston on January 29, 1963, at the age of 88. He is buried in the Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont ^[2].

Few writers occupy the place in American memory that Frost does. His poems remain fixtures of school curricula, and lines such as "Good fences make good neighbors" and "miles to go before I sleep" circulate in speech far beyond literary settings, often detached from the ironies Frost built into them ^[4]. President Kennedy spoke at the October 1963 groundbreaking for the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College weeks before his own death, saying that a nation reveals itself by the men it honors ^[7].

Scholarship on Frost has moved in waves. Lawrance Thompson's authorized three-volume biography, published between 1966 and 1976, painted a harsh portrait of a jealous and difficult man; later biographers, including Jay Parini, have pushed back and restored a more balanced picture ^[6]. Whatever the verdict on his character, critical respect for the poems has only grown, with "Directive," "Home Burial," and "Desert Places" now read as major twentieth century poems rather than regional curiosities ^[4].

Any Robert Frost biography ends with the places he made famous. The Frost farm in Derry, New Hampshire, and the Frost sites in Franconia and Ripton are preserved as museums and writing centers, and readers still walk the woods he wrote about ^[3]. A century after North of Boston, his work continues to test the proposition he set for himself: that a poem, as he put it, begins in delight and ends in wisdom ^[1].