Robert Frost

Robert Frost (1874-1963), American poet, who was one of the major American poets of the 20th century.

Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco and educated at Dartmouth College and Harvard University. In 1885 his father died, and his mother moved with the family to Lawrence, Massachusetts. After graduation from high school, Frost sporadically attended college and earned his living by working variously as a bobbin boy in a wool mill, a shoemaker, a country schoolteacher, the editor of a rural newspaper, and a farmer. He also wrote poetry, but he had little success in having his poems published.

In 1912 Frost sold his farm, gave up a teaching post at the New Hampshire State Normal School, and went to live in England. There he met such established poets as Lascelles Abercrombie and the young poet Rupert Brooke (then unknown outside the narrow upper-class circles), who became his friends and did much to aid his literary career. With their help, Frost published his first two volumes of poetry, a group of lyrics entitled A Boy's Will (1913) and a series of dramatic monologues called North of Boston (1914). These works won him immediate recognition, and in 1915 Frost returned to the United States to find that his fame had preceded him. Thereafter he continued to write poetry with increasing success, while living on farms in Vermont and New Hampshire and teaching literature at Amherst College, the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and Dartmouth College. Among the volumes of poetry he produced are Mountain Interval (1916), West-Running Brook (1928), A Further Range (1936), A Masque of Reason (1945), and In the Clearing (1962). Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times (1924, 1931, 1937, 1943); in 1961, at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, he became the first poet to read a poem at a presidential inauguration. He died January 29, 1963, in Boston.

Frost's poetry is based mainly upon the life and scenery of rural New England, and the language of his verse reflects the compact idiom of that region. Although he concentrates on ordinary subject matter, his emotional range is wide and deep, and he is capable of shifting in the same poem from a tone of humorous banter to the passionate expression of tragic experience. The underlying philosophy of Frost's poetry is rooted in traditional New England individualism, and his work shows his strong sympathy for the values of early American society.