Robert Frost - (1874-1963)
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San Pedro High School in San Pedro, California
I. Biography
Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, California. His father was a newspaper editor who died when Robert was 10 years old. Young Frost and his mother went to live with his grandfather in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
In 1892, Frost graduated from Lawrence High School as class poet and as co-valedictorian with a brilliant young woman named Elinor Miriam White, whom he married three years later. He wanted to dedicate himself to the life of a poet even before his graduation from high school. However, his one grandfather was determined to make a lawyer out of him and persuaded him to enter Dartmouth College in the fall of 1892. Frost left Dartmouth before he completed his first semester. During the next few years, he earned his living by occasionally teaching school, working as a bobbin boy in a Lawrence wool mill, trying to be a newspaper reporter, and doing odd jobs.
After his marriage to Elinor White in 1895 at the age of 21, he spent two years helping his mother operate a small private school in Lawrence. He then entered Harvard University because he wanted to become a more advanced teacher. However, he only spent two years there.
An important turning point came in Robert Frost's life when a doctor warned him that he might have tuberculosis and that country life might be better for him. He decided to resort to a farmer's life. His grandfather bought him a small farm near Derry, New Hampshire, where he raised chickens over the next five years. For eleven years he worked the land unsuccessfully, and therefore had to teach in order to have any kind of steady income. However, working on the farm gave him the opportunity to use scenes around his farm as subject matter for his poems. Neither farming nor poetry gave Frost adequate income for his wife and family of three daughters and one son. He tried teaching again in New Hampshire but this lasted only seven years.
II. Professional Life as a Poet
Robert Frost decided to make one last effort at becoming a poet. He took his family to England in the fall of 1912, a trip made possible by the sale of his farm and income received from the estate of his deceased grandfather. Within three months of his arrival, he submitted a manuscript of A Boy's Will to a London publisher and signed a contract. The British reviews of this book were not outstanding. A year later, North of Boston was published and was received enthusiastically by the people. Finally, at the age of forty, after spending twenty years trying to become a poet, Robert Frost received recognition in England and attracted the attention of critics and editors in the United States.
Robert Frost lived a very troubled and difficult life. Two of his children died in infancy, another died in childbirth, another became insane, and one killed himself. His wife Elinor also died at a young age in 1938. These tragedies can be seen in his poetry.
When Robert Frost went to England in 1912, he met some famous poets such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, Ezra Pound, and Lascelles Abercrombie, who became his friends and helped him in his career as a poet. It was with their help that he published his first two works of poetry, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914). When he returned to the United States, he continued to write poetry with even more success. He wrote Mountain Interval (1916), West-Running Brook (1928), Collected Poems (1930), A Further Range (1936), Collected Poems (1939), A Witness Tree (1942), A Masque of Reason (1945), Steeple Bush (1947), A Mask of Mercy (1947), How Not to be King (1941), and In the Clearing (1962). Frost was also a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner and honored by literary societies, colleges, and universities throughout the world. The United States Senate adopted a resolution of honor on his 75th birthday. He was appointed consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1958. On January 20, 1961, at the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy, Robert Frost recited his poem, "The Gift Outright". This occasion was the first time in history of the United States that a poet had been honored in this manner. It was a high point in Robert Frost's long and distinguished career.
Instead of slowing down at the end of his long career, Frost finished in a strong manner. He received honorary degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge. He helped Ezra Pound get a release from an insane asylum. He went on official trips to Brazil, Peru, Israel, and Greece. He met Nikita Khrushchev in Russia. He published one of his most successful books on his 88th birthday. Robert Frost died on January 29, 1963, in Boston, Massachusetts.
III. Content and Style of Robert Frost's Poetry
The poems of Robert Frost, such as "Mending Wall" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", appear to be simple and easy to read. But his poems contain complex feelings, often through irony and dry wit. Frost used ordinary language in describing the doubt and uncertainty that come in everyday life. These feelings link him to the modern world, despite his use of traditional poetic style and forms.
Many of Frost's poems can be identified with New England, particularly Vermont and New Hampshire. They contain subject matter on the region's landscapes, folklore, and the people's speech. Classical poets had influenced him very much. Even though he tended to restrict himself to the scenes of New England, the moods in his poetry have a great deal of variety. One can see a philosopher in one poem, terror and tragedy of life in another, and threatening parts of nature in still others.
By putting people and nature side by side, Frost is the kind of poet associated with England and the United States in the 1900's. However, there is a distinction between his themes and those of the poets before him. The romantic poets of the 1800's believed people and nature could live in harmony. To Frost, people and nature have a different purpose and are not the same. He believes people's best chance for peace comes not from understanding nature, but from working productively amid the forces of nature.
No literary figure has been more closely identified with our heritage than Robert Frost. No matter what he is describing, he conveys a special feeling of some intensity. He has a special gift of making what is personal to him personal to others. Robert Frost did not want to call himself a poet during his life time, insisting "It's for the world to say whether you're a poet or not." People across the world will not forget him for his unique and unusual poetic works.
IV. Literary Works
A Boy's Will (1913)
North of Boston (1914)
Mountain Interval (1916)
West-Running Brook (1928)
Collected Poems (1930)
A Further Range (1936)
Collected Poems (1939)
A Witness Tree (1942)
A Masque of Reason (1945)
Steeple Bush (1947)
A Mask of Mercy (1947)
How Not to be King (1941)
In the Clearing (1962)
V. Sources
"American Literature."
World Book™ Multimedia Encyclopedia. 1998 ed.
Bloom, Harold. Robert Frost. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.
"Frost, Robert Lee." World Book™ Multimedia Encyclopedia
. 1998 ed.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Robert Frost: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996.
Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
"Pound, Ezra Loomis." World Book™ Multimedia Encyclopedia. 1998 ed.
"Robert Frost." Cyclopedia of World Authors Revised Third Edition. Volume 2. 1997 ed.
This essay was submitted by a student of Kathy Honda Stein, a teacher at San Pedro High School in California.