Robert Frost (1874 - 1963) was an American poet whose work drew on the landscape, speech and rural life of New England to address questions of isolation, choice and mortality. [1] He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times, more than any other poet, and received the Congressional Gold Medal. [2] Among the most widely read American poets of the twentieth century, he recited "The Gift Outright" at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961.
Early life
Frost was born on 26 March 1874 in San Francisco, where his father worked as a journalist. [1] After his father's death in 1885 the family moved east to Lawrence, Massachusetts, the region with which his poetry would become identified. He shared the position of valedictorian at Lawrence High School with Elinor White, whom he married in 1895.
He attended Dartmouth College and later Harvard University but completed no degree at either, and supported himself by teaching, working in a mill and, from 1900, farming in Derry, New Hampshire. [3] The Derry years were financially difficult and productive; much of the material of his first books came from them.
England and recognition
In 1912 Frost sold the farm and moved his family to England, where he found publishers more receptive. A Boy's Will appeared in 1913 and North of Boston in 1914, the latter containing "Mending Wall" and "The Death of the Hired Man". [1] He formed friendships with Edward Thomas, Ezra Pound and other writers, and Pound's review helped establish his reputation.
He returned to the United States in 1915 to find himself already known, and bought a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire. [2] Over the following decades he combined writing with teaching at Amherst College, the University of Michigan and the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont.
The poetry
Frost worked largely in traditional metre and rhyme at a time when many contemporaries were abandoning both, and described free verse as playing tennis with the net down. [4] He aimed at what he called the sound of sense, capturing the rhythms of ordinary spoken New England English within formal structures such as blank verse and the sonnet.
The surface accessibility of poems like "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not Taken" long encouraged readings of him as a genial rural poet, a view later criticism has set aside in favour of a darker account, attentive to the isolation, resignation and menace in "Home Burial", "Design" and "Acquainted with the Night". [3] "The Road Not Taken", frequently read as a celebration of individualism, is written by a speaker who concedes that the two paths were worn about the same.
Later life and legacy
Frost's private life was marked by repeated loss, including the deaths of four of his six children and of his wife Elinor in 1938. [1] Public honours accumulated nonetheless: Pulitzer Prizes for New Hampshire, Collected Poems, A Further Range and A Witness Tree, the Bollingen Prize, the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960, honorary degrees from Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard, and appointment as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.
In January 1961, at the age of eighty-six, he spoke at John F. Kennedy's inauguration; unable to read a new poem in the glare and wind, he recited "The Gift Outright" from memory. [2] He died in Boston on 29 January 1963. His work remains a fixture of American school curricula and of the national literary canon. [4]
