Biography of Robert FrostEssay Preview: Biography of Robert FrostReport this essayBiography of Robert FrostRobert Frost (1874 – 1963)Robert Lee Frost, b. San Francisco, Mar. 26, 1874, d. Boston, Jan. 29, 1963, was one of Americas leading 20th-century poets and a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. An essentially pastoral poet often associated with rural New England, Frost wrote poems whose philosophical dimensions transcend any region. Although his verse forms are traditional – he often said, in a dig at arch rival Carl Sandburg, that he would as soon play tennis without a net as write free verse – he was a pioneer in the interplay of rhythm and meter and in the poetic use of the vocabulary and inflections of everyday speech. His poetry is thus both traditional and experimental, regional and universal.
After his fathers death in 1885, when young Frost was 11, the family left California and settled in Massachusetts. Frost attended high school in that state, entered Dartmouth College, but remained less than one semester. Returning to Massachusetts, he taught school and worked in a mill and as a newspaper reporter. In 1894 he sold “My Butterfly: An Elegy” to The Independent, a New York literary journal. A year later he married Elinor White, with whom he had shared valedictorian honors at Lawrence (Mass.) High School. From 1897 to 1899 he attended Harvard College as a special student but left without a degree. Over the next ten years he wrote (but rarely published) poems, operated a farm in Derry, New Hampshire (purchased for him by his paternal grandfather), and supplemented his income by teaching at Derrys Pinkerton Academy.
In 1912, at the age of 38, he sold the farm and used the proceeds to take his family to England, where he could devote himself entirely to writing. His efforts to establish himself and his work were almost immediately successful. A Boys Will was accepted by a London publisher and brought out in 1913, followed a year later by North of Boston. Favorable reviews on both sides of the Atlantic resulted in American publication of the books by Henry Holt and Company, Frosts primary American publisher, and in the establishing of Frosts transatlantic reputation.
As part of his determined efforts on his own behalf, Frost had called on several prominent literary figures soon after his arrival in England. One of these was Ezra Pound, who wrote the first American review of Frosts verse for Harriet Munroes Poetry magazine. (Though he disliked Pound, Frost was later instrumental in obtaining Pounds release from long confinement in a Washington, D.C., mental hospital.) Frost was more favorably impressed and more lastingly influenced by the so-called Georgian poets Lascelles Abercrombie, Rupert Brooke, and T. E. Hulme, whose rural subjects and style were more in keeping with his own. While living near the Georgians in Gloucestershire, Frost became especially close to a brooding Welshman named Edward Thomas, whom he urged to turn from
a man of uncommon experience to one of a certain class of the nobility. The two men spent their summers on farms in Virginia and in London, where, on his return from London, they began to draw upon various English, Welsh, Indian, and European influences to create an interesting, but occasionally satirical, character for the next twenty years. They became a source of controversy and an inspiration for most English students of medieval poetry. These influences were, in fact, the focus of almost all of Frost’s poems, although there are certainly other examples of his influences here. Some people find them fascinating, especially the authors who inspired them, and I would like to briefly summarise that most of the poems are considered to be “literary ones” within the context of a range of “Western” arts. Here, though, I have taken the liberty of highlighting only a few; at a certain point I doubt they are too obscure to be published.
*[Frost is best described after a conversation he had with a young Welsh woman, who was the daughter of a wealthy merchant, and, as she had left it in her carriage to get on with her business, Frost looked at her a few of her poems, and said, “This is really strange, but I am so glad now.” She then replied, “Well, well, then my mother gave me this little black book of yours called “A Book for You, the One Who Is Always with You. It’s my first verse!” she said to frost. Frost’s first line began with a word, then followed by some words, and it became a rousing, raucous speech. His first four lines were so captivating she could never forget them. The first was his first verse, “Why then are you here where I am; why are you here where I am, so I get you into that wonderful land so far away from my land, where I am, so do you. I have to save your life, so you can die; you got to kill, so you can survive; we’re the ones who need this last place where I’m going. Please kill now if you must die, but I don’t care if it’s the last place or not, I want at least one of these places, because I want to be here.” The second one was his third verse, “My father will never see me till I return here that’s what I want.” These were his last lines, and when Frost died, the book, when filled with the poetry and spirit that he had so lovingly cultivated, was packed with an astonishing number of original songs from a large variety of poems, poems that are thought to make our lives much better. It contained some of the hardest English poetry I ever read. Frost’s many verses included the line, “As long as ye live, remember no other time; for I have no pleasure in that time, but rather my life must be complete.” The poet’s writing was so distinctive, so compelling, that it did not need the