biography of author robert frost

Robert Frost

(1874-1963)

Who Was Robert Frost?

Frost spent his first 40 years as an unknown. He exploded on the scene after returning from England at the beginning of World War I . He died of complications from prostate surgery on January 29, 1963.

Early Years

Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, California. He spent the first 11 years of his life there, until his journalist father, William Prescott Frost Jr., died of tuberculosis.

Following his father's passing, Frost moved with his mother and sister, Jeanie, to the town of Lawrence, Massachusetts. They moved in with his grandparents, and Frost attended Lawrence High School.

After high school, Frost attended Dartmouth College for several months, returning home to work a slew of unfulfilling jobs.

Beginning in 1897, Frost attended Harvard University but had to drop out after two years due to health concerns. He returned to Lawrence to join his wife.

In 1900, Frost moved with his wife and children to a farm in New Hampshire — property that Frost's grandfather had purchased for them—and they attempted to make a life on it for the next 12 years. Though it was a fruitful time for Frost's writing, it was a difficult period in his personal life and followed the deaths of two of his young children.

During that time, Frost and Elinor attempted several endeavors, including poultry farming, all of which were fairly unsuccessful.

Despite such challenges, it was during this time that Frost acclimated himself to rural life. In fact, he grew to depict it quite well, and began setting many of his poems in the countryside.

Frost met his future love and wife, Elinor White, when they were both attending Lawrence High School. She was his co-valedictorian when they graduated in 1892.

In 1894, Frost proposed to White, who was attending St. Lawrence University , but she turned him down because she first wanted to finish school. Frost then decided to leave on a trip to Virginia, and when he returned, he proposed again. By then, White had graduated from college, and she accepted. They married on December 19, 1895.

White died in 1938. Diagnosed with cancer in 1937 and having undergone surgery, she also had had a long history of heart trouble, to which she ultimately succumbed.

Frost and White had six children together. Their first child, Elliot, was born in 1896. Daughter Lesley was born in 1899.

Elliot died of cholera in 1900. After his death, Elinor gave birth to four more children: son Carol (1902), who would commit suicide in 1940; Irma (1903), who later developed mental illness; Marjorie (1905), who died in her late 20s after giving birth; and Elinor (1907), who died just weeks after she was born.

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Early Poetry

In 1894, Frost had his first poem, "My Butterfly: an Elegy," published in The Independent , a weekly literary journal based in New York City .

Two poems, "The Tuft of Flowers" and "The Trial by Existence," were published in 1906. He could not find any publishers who were willing to underwrite his other poems.

In 1912, Frost and Elinor decided to sell the farm in New Hampshire and move the family to England, where they hoped there would be more publishers willing to take a chance on new poets.

Within just a few months, Frost, now 38, found a publisher who would print his first book of poems, A Boy’s Will , followed by North of Boston a year later.

It was at this time that Frost met fellow poets Ezra Pound and Edward Thomas, two men who would affect his life in significant ways. Pound and Thomas were the first to review his work in a favorable light, as well as provide significant encouragement. Frost credited Thomas's long walks over the English landscape as the inspiration for one of his most famous poems, "The Road Not Taken."

Apparently, Thomas's indecision and regret regarding what paths to take inspired Frost's work. The time Frost spent in England was one of the most significant periods in his life, but it was short-lived. Shortly after World War I broke out in August 1914, Frost and Elinor were forced to return to America.

Public Recognition for Frost’s Poetry

When Frost arrived back in America, his reputation had preceded him, and he was well-received by the literary world. His new publisher, Henry Holt, who would remain with him for the rest of his life, had purchased all of the copies of North of Boston . In 1916, he published Frost's Mountain Interval , a collection of other works that he created while in England, including a tribute to Thomas.

Journals such as the Atlantic Monthly , who had turned Frost down when he submitted work earlier, now came calling. Frost famously sent the Atlantic the same poems that they had rejected before his stay in England.

In 1915, Frost and Elinor settled down on a farm that they purchased in Franconia, New Hampshire. There, Frost began a long career as a teacher at several colleges, reciting poetry to eager crowds and writing all the while.

He taught at Dartmouth and the University of Michigan at various times, but his most significant association was with Amherst College , where he taught steadily during the period from 1916 until his wife’s death in 1938. The main library is now named in his honor.

For a period of more than 40 years beginning in 1921, Frost also spent almost every summer and fall at Middlebury College , teaching English on its campus in Ripton, Vermont.

In the late 1950s, Frost, along with Ernest Hemingway and T. S. Eliot , championed the release of his old acquaintance Ezra Pound, who was being held in a federal mental hospital for treason due to his involvement with fascists in Italy during World War II . Pound was released in 1958, after the indictments were dropped.

Famous Poems

Some of Frost’s most well-known poems include:

• “The Road Not Taken”
• “Fire and Ice”
• “Mending Wall”
• “Home Burial”
• “The Death of the Hired Man”
• “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”
• “Acquainted with the Night”
• “Nothing Gold Can Stay”

Pulitzer Prizes and Awards

During his lifetime, Frost received more than 40 honorary degrees.

In 1924, Frost was awarded his first of four Pulitzer Prizes, for his book New Hampshire . He would subsequently win Pulitzers for Collected Poems (1931), A Further Range (1937) and A Witness Tree (1943).

In 1960, Congress awarded Frost the Congressional Gold Medal.

President John F. Kennedy’s Inauguration

At the age of 86, Frost was honored when asked to write and recite a poem for President John F. Kennedy's 1961 inauguration. His sight now failing, he was not able to see the words in the sunlight and substituted the reading of one of his poems, "The Gift Outright," which he had committed to memory.

Soviet Union Tour

In 1962, Frost visited the Soviet Union on a goodwill tour. However, when he accidentally misrepresented a statement made by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev following their meeting, he unwittingly undid much of the good intended by his visit.

On January 29, 1963, Frost died from complications related to prostate surgery. He was survived by two of his daughters, Lesley and Irma. His ashes are interred in a family plot in Bennington, Vermont.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Robert Lee Frost
• Birth Year: 1874
• Birth date: March 26, 1874
• Birth State: California
• Birth City: San Francisco
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Robert Frost was an American poet who depicted realistic New England life through language and situations familiar to the common man. He won four Pulitzer Prizes for his work and spoke at John F. Kennedy's 1961 inauguration.
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Aries
• Harvard University
• Lawrence High School
• Dartmouth College
• Death Year: 1963
• Death date: January 29, 1963
• Death State: Massachusetts
• Death City: Boston
• Death Country: United States

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Robert Frost Biography
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• Last Updated: December 1, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• The ear does it. The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.
• I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

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Robert Frost

Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, where his father, William Prescott Frost, Jr., and his mother, Isabelle Moodie, had moved from Pennsylvania shortly after marrying. After the death of his father from tuberculosis when Frost was eleven years old, he moved with his mother and sister, Jeanie, who was two years younger, to Lawrence, Massachusetts. He became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, enrolled at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire in 1892 and, later, at Harvard University, though he never earned a formal degree.

Frost drifted through a string of occupations after leaving school, working as a teacher, cobbler, and editor of the Lawrence Sentinel . His first published poem, “My Butterfly,” appeared on November 8, 1894 in the New York newspaper The Independent .

In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, with whom he’d shared valedictorian honors in high school, and who was a major inspiration for his poetry until her death in 1938. The couple moved to England in 1912, after they tried and failed at farming in New Hampshire. It was abroad where Frost met and was influenced by such contemporary British poets as Edward Thomas , Rupert Brooke , and Robert Graves . While in England, Frost also established a friendship with the poet Ezra Pound , who helped to promote and publish his work.

By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length collections, A Boy’s Will (Henry Holt and Company, 1913) and North of Boston (Henry Holt and Company, 1914), thereby establishing his reputation. By the 1920s, he was the most celebrated poet in America, and with each new book—including New Hampshire (Henry Holt and Company, 1923), A Further Range (Henry Holt and Company, 1936), Steeple Bush (Henry Holt and Company, 1947), and In the Clearing (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1962)—his fame and honors, including four Pulitzer Prizes, increased. Frost served as a consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress from 1958–59. In 1962, he was presented the Congressional Gold Medal. 

Though Frost’s work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England—and, though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his time—Frost is anything but merely a regional poet. The author of searching, and often dark, meditations on universal themes, he is a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony.

In a 1970 review of The Poetry of Robert Frost , the poet Daniel Hoffman describes Frost’s early work as “the Puritan ethic turned astonishingly lyrical and enabled to say out loud the sources of its own delight in the world,” and comments on Frost’s career as the “American Bard”: “He became a national celebrity, our nearly official poet laureate, and a great performer in the tradition of that earlier master of the literary vernacular, Mark Twain.”

President John F. Kennedy, at whose inauguration Frost delivered a poem, said of the poet, “He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding.” And famously, “He saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died in Boston on January 29, 1963.

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Biography of Robert Frost

America's Farmer/Philosopher Poet

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Robert Frost — even the sound of his name is folksy, rural: simple, New England, white farmhouse, red barn, stone walls. And that’s our vision of him, thin white hair blowing at JFK’s inauguration, reciting his poem “The Gift Outright.” (The weather was too blustery and frigid for him to read “Dedication,” which he had written specifically for the event, so he simply performed the only poem he had memorized. It was oddly fitting.) As usual, there’s some truth in the myth — and a lot of back story that makes Frost much more interesting — more poet, less icon Americana.

Early Years

Robert Lee Frost was born March 26, 1874 in San Francisco to Isabelle Moodie and William Prescott Frost, Jr. The Civil War had ended nine years previously, Walt Whitman was 55. Frost had deep US roots: his father was a descendant of a Devonshire Frost who sailed to New Hampshire in 1634. William Frost had been a teacher and then a journalist, was known as a drinker, a gambler and a harsh disciplinarian. He also dabbled in politics, for as long as his health allowed. He died of tuberculosis in 1885, when his son was 11.

Youth and College Years

After the death of his father, Robert, his mother and sister moved from California to eastern Massachusetts near his paternal grandparents. His mother joined the Swedenborgian church and had him baptized in it, but Frost left it as an adult. He grew up as a city boy and attended Dartmouth College in 1892, for just less than a semester. He went back home to teach and work at various jobs including factory work and newspaper delivery.

First Publication and Marriage

In 1894 Frost sold his first poem, “My Butterfly,” to  The New York Independent for $15. It begins: “Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too, / And the daft sun-assaulter, he / That frighted thee so oft, is fled or dead.” On the strength of this accomplishment, he asked Elinor Miriam White, his high school co-valedictorian, to marry him: she refused. She wanted to finish school before they married. Frost was sure that there was another man and made an excursion to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia. He came back later that year and asked Elinor again; this time she accepted. They married in December 1895.

Farming, Expatriating

The newlyweds taught school together until 1897, when Frost entered Harvard for two years. He did well, but left school to return home when his wife was expecting a second child. He never returned to college, never earned a degree. His grandfather bought a farm for the family in Derry, New Hampshire (you can still visit this farm). Frost spent nine years there, farming and writing — the poultry farming was not successful but the writing drove him on, and back to teaching for a couple more years. In 1912, the Frost gave up the farm, sailed to Glasgow, and later settled in Beaconsfield, outside London.

Success in England

Frost’s efforts to establish himself in England were immediately successful. In 1913 he published his first book,  A Boy’s Will , followed a year later by North of Boston . It was in England that he met such poets as Rupert Brooke, T.E. Hulme and Robert Graves, and established his lifelong friendship with Ezra Pound, who helped to promote and publish his work. Pound was the first American to write a (favorable) review of Frost’s work. In England Frost also met Edward Thomas, a member of the group known as the Dymock poets; it was walks with Thomas that led to Frost’s beloved but “tricky” poem, “The Road Not Taken.”

The Most Celebrated Poet in North America

Frost returned to the U.S. in 1915 and, by the 1920s, he was the most celebrated poet in North America, winning four Pulitzer Prizes (still a record). He lived on a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire, and from there carried on a long career writing, teaching and lecturing. From 1916 to 1938, he taught at Amherst College, and from 1921 to 1963 he spent his summers teaching at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference at Middlebury College, which he helped found. Middlebury still owns and maintains his farm as a National Historic site: it is now a museum and poetry conference center.

Upon his death in Boston on January 29, 1963, Robert Frost was buried in the Old Bennington Cemetery, in Bennington, Vermont. He said, “I don’t go to church, but I look in the window.” It does say something about one’s beliefs to be buried behind a church, although the gravestone faces in the opposite direction. Frost was a man famous for contradictions, known as a cranky and egocentric personality – he once lit a wastebasket on fire on stage when the poet before him went on too long. His gravestone of Barre granite with hand-carved laurel leaves is inscribed, “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world

Frost in the Poetry Sphere

Even though he was first discovered in England and extolled by the archmodernist Ezra Pound, Robert Frost’s reputation as a poet has been that of the most conservative, traditional, formal verse-maker. This may be changing: Paul Muldoon claims Frost as “the greatest American poet of the 20th century,” and the New York Times has tried to resuscitate him as a proto-experimentalist: “ Frost on the Edge ,” by David Orr, February 4, 2007 in the Sunday Book Review.

No matter. Frost is secure as our farmer/philosopher poet.

• Frost was actually born in San Francisco.
• He lived in California till he was 11 and then moved East — he grew up in cities in Massachusetts.
• Far from a hardscrabble farming apprenticeship, Frost attended Dartmouth and then Harvard. His grandfather bought him a farm when he was in his early 20s.
• When his attempt at chicken farming failed, he served a stint teaching at a private school and then he and his family moved to England.
• It was while he was in Europe that he was discovered by the US expat and Impresario of Modernism, Ezra Pound, who published him in  Poetry .

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in....” --“The Death of the Hired Man”

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall....” --“ Mending Wall ”​

“Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.... --“ Fire and Ice”

A Girl’s Garden

Robert Frost (from  Mountain Interval , 1920)

A neighbor of mine in the village     Likes to tell how one spring When she was a girl on the farm, she did     A childlike thing.

One day she asked her father     To give her a garden plot To plant and tend and reap herself,     And he said, “Why not?”

 In casting about for a corner     He thought of an idle bit Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,     And he said, “Just it.”

And he said, “That ought to make you     An ideal one-girl farm, And give you a chance to put some strength     On your slim-jim arm.”

It was not enough of a garden,     Her father said, to plough; So she had to work it all by hand,     But she don’t mind now.

She wheeled the dung in the wheelbarrow     Along a stretch of road; But she always ran away and left     Her not-nice load.

And hid from anyone passing.     And then she begged the seed. She says she thinks she planted one     Of all things but weed.

A hill each of potatoes,     Radishes, lettuce, peas, Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,     And even fruit trees

And yes, she has long mistrusted     That a cider apple tree In bearing there to-day is hers,     Or at least may be.

Her crop was a miscellany     When all was said and done, A little bit of everything,     A great deal of none.

Now when she sees in the village     How village things go, Just when it seems to come in right,     She says, “I know!

It’s as when I was a farmer——”     Oh, never by way of advice! And she never sins by telling the tale     To the same person twice.

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Article contents

Robert frost.

• Tyler Hoffman Tyler Hoffman Rutgers University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.635
• Published online: 26 September 2017

Born on 26 March 1874 in San Francisco to Isabelle Moodie and William Prescott Frost Jr. , Robert Lee Frost gained distinction not only as one of the most accomplished poets of the modernist period but also as one of the most popular poets in American history. Although born on the West Coast, he is closely tied to New England, where he lived most of his life, and his poetry takes stock of the people and places of that region in a combination of bold new colloquial rhythms and traditional forms; indeed, his method could be called “the old-fashioned way to be new,” a phrase that Frost used to praise his fellow New England poet Edwin Arlington Robinson . Along with his regional focus, Frost wrote poetry that responds directly (if metaphorically) to national and international political cultures and events during his lifetime. The surface ease of his poetry allowed him to reach a general public that many other modernist poets did not; however, beneath the surfaces of his poems are murky depths without a clear bottom. Indeed, it is the ambiguity that surrounds much of his greatest poetry that makes it so challenging and rewarding, and the critical and popular success he achieved as a poet is unprecedented. By the time of Frost's death in 1963 , he had been awarded four Pulitzer Prizes and the prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry, and his recital at John F. Kennedy 's presidential inauguration in 1961 symbolized his apotheosis into America's beloved poet-sage.

Early Years

Frost's childhood was spent in San Francisco until his father, city editor of the San Francisco Daily Evening Post , died of tuberculosis when Robert was eight years old, at which time his mother returned with her children to Lawrence, Massachusetts, to teach school (they were supported financially by Robert's paternal grandparents). In 1890 Robert published his first poem, La Noche Triste , based on his reading of William Prescott 's History of the Conquest of Mexico , and also published poems in the Lawrence High School Bulletin . Frost was covaledictorian of his high school class, an honor that he shared with his future wife, Elinor . He became engaged to Elinor in 1892 and matriculated as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College in the fall of the same year. In his few months at Dartmouth, Frost ran across an issue of the New York newspaper The Independent , the first page of which was dedicated to a new poem by Richard Hovey (a recent graduate of Dartmouth) entitled Seaward: An Elegy on the Death of Thomas William Parsons . The editorial in that issue announced that Hovey's poem was one of the finest elegies ever written in English, and Frost's reading of the poem and the accompanying editorial encouraged him to write an elegy of his own, which he sent to Susan Hayes Ward , the literary editor of The Independent , with whom he began a correspondence. The poem was published by her as My Butterfly: An Elegy on 8 November 1894 and marks the true beginning of Frost's career.

Frost's privately printed book Twilight ( 1894 ) included My Butterfly along with four other Victorian-style lyrics, and he had two copies of it made—one for himself and one for Elinor. Beginning in 1893 , Frost worked in mills in Lawrence and surrounding towns, and he later commemorated that time in sonnets that addressed the plight of the factory worker. The Mill City ( 1905 ) and When the Speed Comes ( 1906 ) express Frost's sympathy for the working poor and the miserable lives they lead, pointing up Frost's progressivist political spirit. His poem The Parlor Joke ( 1910 ), which was published in an anthology in 1920 but was never collected by Frost, further reveals Frost's concerns over unfettered capitalism, as he depicts how the entrepreneurial and managerial elite do everything they can to milk the system, to the point of tempting the workers to join the communist camp. Frost's sympathies seem to lie elsewhere in political poems he would write some thirty years later in response to the New Deal; however, these early poems make clear his concern for common men and women and his commitment to writing poetry that honors them in both form and theme.

“The Sound of Sense”

Having spent two years as a student at Harvard ( 1897–1899 ), over ten years farming in Derry, New Hampshire, and a few years teaching, Frost decided to move his family to London in 1912 in an effort to make himself known as a poet among those in a position to advance his career. (He had only published a handful of poems in American publications up to that point.) Coming into contact with Ezra Pound and the English Georgian poets, among others, Frost began to make a name for himself, thanks in no small part to the theory of poetic form he fashioned there.

In 1894 Frost wrote a letter to Susan Hayes Ward stating his early interest in the element of sound in poetry, “one,” he said, “but for which imagination would become reason.” As yet only a figurative consideration, this auditory property would be developed some twenty years later into Frost's predominant prosodic theory. During his stay in England ( 1912–1915 ), Frost realized he would need to declare his aesthetic in an effort to defuse critics who might be inclined to dismiss him as a parochial American. In conversations with the imagist poet Frank Flint and the poet-philosopher T. E. Hulme , Frost formulated his principle of versification and sent out his ideas in letters to friends, many of whom were would-be reviewers.

In a letter auspiciously dated “Fourth of July, 1913 ,” Frost declared his artistic independence to his friend John Bartlett : “To be perfectly frank with you I am one of the most notable craftsmen of my time.…I am possibly the only person going who works on any but a worn out theory (principle I had better say) of versification.…I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.” As he explains, by “the sound of sense” he means intonation—the rhythm of speech that communicates sense without respect to the meanings of the words of a sentence: “The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words.” To demonstrate his point, Frost set down in his letter to Bartlett several sentences that embody striking tones of voice: “I said no such thing”; “You're not my teacher”; “Oh, say!” Frost insists that these vocal contours must be carried over into poetry, that the sounds of poetry must be no different from the sounds we hear every day in talk. However, Frost also insisted that “the sound of sense” must be plotted on the grid of meter: “if one is to be a poet he must learn to get cadences by skillfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre.” Frost clung to this theory of form, which is heavily influenced by the philosophical and psychological writings of William James and Henri Bergson , throughout his career, and its effect on his poetry began to be felt in his first commercially published collection of verse, A Boy's Will .

• A Boy's Will (1913)

When Frost was in London, at the not so tender age of forty, he saw into print A Boy's Will , a title that is borrowed from a line in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 's poem My Lost Youth . (“A boy's will is the wind's will / And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”) The book, published by David Nutt , was made up of a selection of poems he had brought with him to England, and it included a table of contents that provided glosses of the lyrics, although these glosses were dropped in subsequent editions. These epigraphs, many of them gently ironic, create a story of emotional development for a youth who moves from solitude to society, to a gradual embrace of life's offerings; they also allow Frost to achieve some distance from the persona he constructs and to give the poems a greater coherence. The sequence of lyrics, which unostentatiously contain echoes of other poems in them, follows the cycle of the seasons, beginning and ending in autumn, as it records the fate of the poetic imagination in its encounters with the ever-changing world. Although Ezra Pound, one of Frost's earliest champions, judged the book to be “a little raw,” he and others praised its realism and directness of speech.

In the first poem, Into My Own , Frost imagines his hero charting a new course, coming into his own powers, and that theme certainly resonates with Frost's autobiography. The desire to lose oneself in the darkness of the woods is a topos that marks several of Frost's best-known poems (for instance, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and Come In ), and here he imagines stealing away into the “vastness” of the woods only to have his identity confirmed by the experience: “They would not find me changed from him they knew—/ Only more sure of all I thought was true.” The poem is glossed in the table of contents with a wink at the vaunted self-assurance of the young man: “The youth will be persuaded that he will be rather more than less himself for having forsworn the world.” Although the poem is a sonnet, it does not adhere to a traditional form; rather, it is in couplets, and that unusual shape is meant to signal both Frost's participation in and divergence from literary tradition, his staking out of his own identity as a writer.

Another poem in the book, Storm Fear , sets the stage for Frost's lifelong meditations on the world as measured against the self, in particular the power of the world to endanger love and the security of home. In it, he imagines the terror of a snowstorm that erases all points of familiarity in the landscape and threatens the existence of a family of three huddled against it inside a house. The storm is seen as a “beast,” and its antagonism isolates the family from the rest of the world; the frightened reflection at the end of the poem resonates with statements in Frost's later verse that question man's ability to overcome the harshness of the world: “my heart owns a doubt / Whether 'tis in us to arise with day / And save ourselves unaided.” The uneven lengths of the lines of this metrical poem add to the point, with the unbalance suggesting the precariousness of this family in the face of such an assault.

A few other lyrics from A Boy's Will take up the issue of our social responsibilities and relationships. In Love and a Question , the speaker-bridegroom must come to terms with his duty to a tramp who comes to his door and with his fear of what the tramp might do to them if he is turned away without some offering of charity. In The Tuft of Flowers , a poem that is glossed as “about fellowship,” it is not a displaced worker but a solitary worker coming to turn the grass that had been cut that morning who must figure out his relationship to others. Although when he arrives on the scene he is convinced that all men must toil alone, a tuft of flowers that the earlier worker had left standing (a product of “sheer morning gladness at the brim”) allows him to see a connection between them, finding in him “a spirit kindred” to his own. Frost ends the poem with a philosophy of labor that stands in stark contrast to the one promoted by industrial capitalism: “ ‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart, / ‘Whether they work together or apart.’ ”

Frost also directly addresses the craft of poetry in many of these poems, including Pan with Us , where he reflects on his sense of belatedness as an artist and his need to find new songs to sing in a modern setting. When the speaker announces that Pan “tossed his pipes, too hard to teach / A new-world song,” he is remarking on his own sense of frustration at the need to update his aesthetic, to come to grips with the “new terms of worth.” “Times were changed from what they were,” we are told, and just as Pan's “pipes of pagan mirth” are out of step with the times, so Frost must remodel his poetry along different lines—with a greater attention to colloquial speech rhythms and diction. In To the Thawing Wind he also figures the plight of the poet, with the speaker calling on the forces of spring to release him from his prison: “Scatter poems on the floor; / Turn the poet out of door.” The sequence of end-stopped lines in the poem enforces the impression of stasis, a condition that the poet seeks to overcome as he desires to be propelled outside, into a natural world that will nourish his verse.

One of the most spectacular poems of the book, and the one that distinguishes itself as at the furthest remove from the Victorian prosodic effects that still shape some of these early lyrics, is “Mowing.” Frost called it his first “talk-song,” and in it he reveals his mastery of the principles of the interaction of rhythm and meter that he preached while in England. This poem is another about farm labor, in particular the activity of mowing and the reward that comes from the accomplishment of a hard day's work. The penultimate line of the poem, “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows,” expresses the value of the completed task, and the speaker makes clear that “Anything more than the truth”—that is, any fanciful stories about the job—would not do the experience justice. One also can read the poem as a metaphor for the need of the artist to set “sounds of sense” to work in verse. (Frost once referred in his notebook to realistic tones of voice as “facts.”)

• North of Boston (1914)

Frost's groundbreaking book North of Boston also was published in London, and in it Frost moved away from purely lyric poems to dramatic monologues and dialogues—narrative poems that catch the speech and action of the people of New England in all their vitality. Some of Frost's most moving poems are from this book, which was widely praised not only for its realistic content but also for its revolutionary form. Of this book Frost said in 1937 : “I am often more or less tacitly on the defensive about what I call ‘my people.’ That doesn't mean Americans—I never defend America from foreigners. But when I speak of my people, I sort of mean a class, the ordinary folks I belong to. I have written about them entirely in one whole book: I called it A Book of People .” Many of the poems in that book were written during, or are recollections of, his years in Derry, New Hampshire (he began writing North of Boston in 1905 in Derry and wrote the bulk of it in 1913 in England), and in them he represents both his closeness to and his distance from these “ordinary folks.”

The book was originally framed by two lyric poems set in italics, The Pasture at the beginning and Good Hours at the end. The Pasture , which Frost used to introduce his Collected Poems in 1930 , invites the reader into a pastoral world through the urgent and directed second-person address “You come too.” The final poem, Good Hours , is about a person who wanders off from a community and then reluctantly returns to it, a situation that points up Frost's own marginalized status as a poet in a utilitarian world. It also represents his oblique position to the backcountry he is seeking to record. Frost himself has wandered off from that community—all the way to England, where he is living with his family when North of Boston comes out—and it is perhaps no surprise that Frost should write into that book his strained relationship to New England. These two poems— The Pasture and Good Hours —represent the poles between which Frost shuttles as a poet-ethnographer.

In the original edition of North of Boston , Mending Wall , the poem that comes immediately after The Pasture , is preceded by the following note: “ Mending Wall takes up the theme where A Tuft of Flowers in A Boy's Will laid it down.” Indeed, the poem is about fellowship, and the limits of fellowship, as symbolized by the stone wall that the speaker and his neighbor are repairing from the effects of winter. The tonal indeterminacy of the poem makes it more difficult than it might at first appear: while some people have assumed that the poem is in favor of the erosion of boundaries, others have taken out of context the aphoristic quip of the neighbor, “Good fences make good neighbors,” and imagined that the poem endorses that idea. In fact, the views coexist, as Frost tries hard in the poem to leave open the reader's ability to decide what position the poem supports. (After all, it is the speaker who makes fun of the neighbor for his belief and at the same time proposes mending the wall.) Frost recited this poem in public on numerous occasions and was always able to get new meanings out of it by virtue of the political contexts that shaped those events. For instance, he remarked during the Cold War that it was a poem about nationalists (those who would want boundaries dividing countries and their peoples) and internationalists (those who would not), and one can see in the poem that metaphorical (political) dimension. As with many of Frost's best poems, it is open-ended, susceptible to divergent interpretations.

The dramatic dialogue Home Burial is one of the most emotionally charged poems of North of Boston , staging the grief of a husband and wife for their dead child. The two are estranged from each other, unable to communicate about what has happened, and the title suggests not only the child's burial in the family graveyard but also the death of the relationship of this husband and wife struggling to come to terms with each other and to find some consolation. Although Frost said that the poem was based on the death of a child of Elinor's sister and brother-in-law, in 1900 Robert and Elinor's own son Elliott died from cholera. That experience no doubt is reflected in the poem, and the fact that Frost said it was “too sad” to read in public suggests something of its personal nature. The poem illustrates the different ways people mourn, with the husband stoic in his reaction to the loss and the wife extravagant in her response. Readers of the poem are split in their sympathies: some believe the husband callous; others think the woman hysterical. The beauty of the poem is that Frost allows us to judge for ourselves the quality of their behavior and feel the pull of each at various times in the poem.

In other blank verse poems our sympathies are further tested. In The Death of the Hired Man , Frost tells the story of an old farmhand, Silas, who has come back in an enfeebled condition to help Warren on the farm, even though he has left Warren in the lurch many times before. Like Home Burial , this poem dramatizes gender politics, as the wife's definition of “home”—“something you somehow haven't to deserve”—competes with the husband's more cynical formulation, “ ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.’ ” The poem forces us to consider the responsibilities that we have toward others, and it shows off Frost's sentimentalism as he weighs carefully through his characters those responsibilities. The husband tries to insist on the limits of his need to care for Silas, while the wife's sympathies attempt to draw the husband close to her and Silas. In another poem, The Self-Seeker , which is based on an actual incident involving Frost's friend Carl Burrell, who was severely injured working in a box factory, Frost takes a critical look at the treatment of workers, the lack of sympathy shown them by employers. The friend of the injured man expresses his disgust at the terms that the insurance agent has offered in compensation for his friend's badly mangled legs, and that critique draws out Frost's sense of the social and economic injustices that are built into the system. North of Boston also features several powerful dramatic monologues, which provide readers access to direct speech by placing the native informant at the center of the poem. The emotionally disturbed women speakers of The Housekeeper and A Servant to Servants cry out for our sympathy, as we see them isolated in their homes and on the verge of mental and emotional collapse.

After Apple-Picking , a poem about the effects of overwork on a farmer during harvest time, also lets us see the strain on a speaker through the technique of first-person narration. The shape of the poem on the page (it shifts back and forth between shorter and longer iambic lines) emblematizes the person's emotional unsteadiness, his inability to shake his exhaustion: “I am overtired from the harvest I myself desired.” Haunted by afterimages of the apples he has picked and crated (“Magnified apples appear and disappear”), the overwrought man is caught somewhere between the physical and the metaphysical, in a limbo midway between earth and “heaven.” (“My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still.”) In the penultimate poem of the book, The Wood-Pile , another figure estranged from the world attempts to locate himself, searching for human resemblances in the landscape. A cord of maple decaying in the swamp is all he finds, and its disconnection from human existence points up his own loneliness, a condition that binds together many of the poems and personae of North of Boston .

• Mountain Interval (1916)

Containing a mixture of lyric and dramatic verse, Mountain Interval is the first book Frost published after his return to the United States. It begins with the well-known but often misunderstood The Road Not Taken , in which a speaker pauses to determine which path in a fork in the road to take. After some deliberation, he chooses, and the poem ends by forecasting his reflections on that choice late in life:

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Some readers have failed to detect the irony in these final lines, and so have not seen through the speaker's posturing. Contextual clues within the poem help to pin down the true sense of the closing remark, as, upon close inspection, we see that at the moment of decision circumstances were in fact clouded: although one road initially looks as if “it was grassy and wanted wear,” the traveler immediately corrects himself:

Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black.

The evidence of the poem, then, indicates that he in fact has not taken the road less traveled, although he will be creating a fiction that he did so “ages and ages hence.” The human propensity to create such mythologies represents our desire to imagine our lives as not chaotic, as willfully shaped by us. When the traveler projects himself into the future and defines a purpose to his decision, he is acting as we all sometimes do, and in that recognition we can feel a poignancy in the final lines.

Birches is another popular poem from Mountain Interval , and in it Frost's speaker imagines that the bent birches on the landscape have been bowed by boys' swinging them, not, as Truth dictates, by the weight of ice on their branches. The poem, written while Frost was living in England and published in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1915 , is, on a metaphorical level, about the desire to transcend this world, if only for a moment, to press against the limits of the earthly: “So was I once myself a swinger of birches. / And so I dream of going back to be.” Yearning for the simplicity of childhood, he states, “It's when I'm weary of considerations, / And life is too much like a pathless wood” that “I'd like to get away from earth awhile / And then come back to it and begin over,” as he believes that “Earth's the right place for love.” His desire to climb the branches “Toward heaven” (Frost's italics), never to become fully translated into the spiritual realm, is evidence of Frost's playful attitude toward death and his view that, however painful our experiences on earth might be, there is no substitute for them.

Other poems in the book address the issues of decline and belatedness in the natural world and (metaphorically) in Frost's career as a poet. The unconventional sonnet entitled The Oven Bird is about the making of verse and Frost's relatively late arrival on the scene, and when we are told at the end of the poem that “The question that he [the bird] frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing,” we are encouraged to think of Frost's own attempts to remake poetry in a world that seems “diminished” to some, no longer ripe for figurative treatment. In the poem the “mid-summer” bird makes do with what he has; he does not sing but rather “talks” (the word appears three times in the poem), and that word points to Frost's aesthetic, which is intent on giving the perception of talk through colloquial speech cadences. Hyla Brook , which comes immediately after The Oven Bird , also muses about the challenges of art, though not obviously. The poem is about a brook on Frost's Derry farm that would dry up in the summer, and the conjuration of the “ghost” music of the frogs represents Frost's own lyric song and the danger of the evaporation of poetic inspiration. In the final line, “We love the things we love for what they are,” the poet comes to terms with the diminished nature of things, grounding his imagination in his simple (somewhat depleted) surroundings.

In addition to being self-reflective, Frost was very much attuned to the difficulties of life in the backcountry for women, children, and racial minorities. The Hill Wife is a five-part poem that stands with Frost's other verse about women in rural New England who are tormented by the loneliness and isolation they find there. Like the narrator of A Servant to Servants , who finds herself on the verge of a nervous breakdown, or the woman of The Fear , who is anxious that her estranged husband will seek her out in that lonely place to exact revenge, the portrait of the hill wife without company except her husband shows how fragile she is, driven to madness by her exigent state. In his blank verse poem “ ‘ Out, Out —,’ ” Frost faces squarely the difficult conditions that children meet with in this region. In the poem a boy is killed when his hand is cut off by a saw, and the narrator describes the final moments of the boy's truncated life, reflecting with a political charge that he was “Doing a man's work, though a child at heart.” The final two lines of the poem have generated the most controversy: “And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” The question as to how we are to hear that remark is in doubt: Is it a bitter comment on our indifference to loss? Or rather a flatly worded remark that registers the reality of our world? Frost leaves the question for us to decide, to see for ourselves how we feel about the world and suffering in it. The Vanishing Red is also difficult to penetrate, as its lines do not openly moralize about the killing of the Native American, John, by the Miller but instead force readers to make judgments for themselves. The last line, “Oh, yes, he showed John the wheel-pit all right,” rings with irony, as we learn through that sharp “sound of sense” that the Miller has taken matters into his own hands and pushed the Indian to his death.

New Hampshire (1923)

Frost's fourth volume of poetry, New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes , appeared in November 1923 , with woodcut illustrations by the artist J. J. Lankes, and it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize (the first of four Pulitzers the poet would receive in his career). Critics praised the book for its portrayal of rural New England life and the poet's use of the colloquial. (One remarked that “Mr. Frost's lines sound as if they had been overheard in a telephone booth.”) The formatting of the book parodies T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (published for the first time in book form in December 1922 ), which included Eliot's footnotes to the poem. New Hampshire is divided into three parts: the long title poem, a section of “Notes” (mostly dramatic monologues and dialogues), and a final section of shorter lyrics called “Grace Notes” (grace notes are musical notes added as melodic embellishments). Many items in the long title poem are footnoted, and the reader is led to other poems in the “Notes” section that flesh out these items. Unlike Eliot's footnotes, which refer readers to a list of scholarly citations meant to elucidate symbols within the poem, Frost's footnotes take readers to other poems in the book, as if to insist that outside knowledge is not necessary to interpret the figures that his poems make.

Frost credits the inception of the title poem New Hampshire to a series of articles by well-known writers that appeared in 1922 in The Nation under the banner “These United States.” Frost believed these articles were mainly fault-finding, critical of U.S. commercial enterprise and most likely written by leftists. Frost declined the invitation of The Nation to contribute to the series but began to think about the possibility of a poem that would present a positive image of the (economic) state of New Hampshire. Using Horace's satirical discourses as a model, Frost composed a long poem that praises the economic self-sufficiency of New Hampshire, but many of Frost's critics have found the poem unsatisfying, believing that in it the poet performs in a self-conscious and complacent manner, too much aware of his public role as Yankee philosopher and spokesman.

Frost said that he wrote New Hampshire in one night, working from dusk until dawn. Instead of going directly to bed, however, Frost was inspired to write another poem, which he composed in a few minutes; this second poem was Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening . It is one of several of Frost's poems that address the encounter of a solitary figure with the unknown. Frost's traveler meditates on the dangerous allure of the woods; rather than succumb to the call, however, he reminds himself of his human obligations (“promises to keep”) and his need to continue home. The poem ends with an incantatory repetition (“And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep”) that signifies the trancelike state into which the speaker has fallen and from which he is intent on awakening.

The “Notes” to New Hampshire showcase a wide range of regional figures in their effort to illuminate the content and character of the state and the philosophical issues that are entailed in them. In The Census-Taker the speaker reports his melancholy mood upon confronting a landscape devoid of human activity (a wasteland comparable to Eliot's). Other dramatic monologues include Maple , a poem about a girl given the name “Maple” by her dead mother and her attempts to live up to the significance of that name, and Wild Grapes , a meditation on the relationship between knowledge and feeling that serves as a counterpart to Birches . Frost's masterful dramatic dialogue The Ax-Helve explores theories of education and, just beneath the surface, the art of poetry. In it, a man and his neighbor, a French Canadian woodchopper, exchange views over the carefully crafted curves of an ax handle, which stand for the lines of formalist verse that adhere to the sounds of speech; as Frost once revealed to a reporter, poetry is “in the axe-handle of a French Canadian woodchopper.…You know the Canadian woodchoppers…[make their own] axe-handles, following the curve of the grain, and they're strong and beautiful. Art should follow lines in nature, like the grain of an axe-handle.”

The section “Grace Notes” features “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” along with several other of Frost's most famous lyrics, including his apocalyptic (and playful) Fire and Ice and another short poem, Nothing Gold Can Stay , about mutability as figured in the change of seasons and, as manuscript evidence suggests, about the inevitable embroilment of the United States in international affairs in the wake of World War I. For Once, Then, Something a rare experiment in quantitative meter (each line is eleven syllables long), questions the limits of human knowledge and the possibility of knowing such a thing as Truth. As the speaker looks down into a well, he thinks he may have gotten a glimpse of something at the bottom before a drop of water “blotted it out”; in the final line, he asks, “What was that whiteness? / Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.” It is not clear, though, what that “something” is, or how well it satisfies his longing. In The Need of Being Versed in Country Things , the last poem in the book, Frost represents a scene of desolation similar to the one in The Census-Taker exposing the fiction of the pathetic fallacy, the idea that nature is in sympathy with human loss. As the poem reveals, only humans mourn when a house burns to the ground; the natural world goes on, unmoved by such catastrophe. However, the poem is also a metaphor for Frost's refusal to subscribe to the liberal party line. As he stated in a letter, the poem is meant to rebuke “the welfare-minded,” who with their “damned [liberal] party politics” believe that his subject ought to be “the sadness of the poor”; in other words, when the speaker claims, “One had to be versed in country things / Not to believe the phoebes wept,” he means on one level that one needs to know “people of simplicity” (rural New Englanders) to know that their state is not pitiable, that they do not weep over their condition.

• West-Running Brook (1928)

Frost's fifth collection of verse, West-Running Brook , is structured around the title image of the contrary brook, one that contains a countercurrent in itself, a resistance to the forces of destruction and decline at work in the world. Granville Hicks , a leftist critic, wrote a sharply critical review of the book (and of Frost's 1930 Collected Poems , which won the Pulitzer Prize), charging that Frost did not treat modern urban subjects that were more a part of the landscape than the pastoral sights and sounds of old New England, but others found much to like in the book. The opening poem, Spring Pools , which is about the draining of puddles in forests by the roots of trees, sets up this theme of resistance. The speaker, who is concerned for these pools and wants to preserve them, warns in a striking tone of voice:

Let them [the trees] think twice before they use their powers To blot out and drink up and sweep away These flowery waters and these watery flowers From snow that melted only yesterday.

He knows that the demise of the pools spells his own death, but, ironically, he is also aware that there is no stopping the process.

A couple of other poems in the first section of the book return to the concern of For Once, Then, Something , exploring our relationship to the mysteries of our world. A Passing Glimpse ends in the couplet “Heaven gives its glimpses only to those / Not in position to look too close,” as we are reminded of the limitations of the human condition, limitations that we are compelled to try to overcome. In On Going Unnoticed , Frost deflates man's high regard of himself, his raw egotism, in the face of sublime nature:

As vain to raise a voice as a sigh In the tumult of free leaves on high. What are you in the shadow of trees Engaged up there with the light and breeze?

And yet despite man's “small” size, despite the fact that his name is not written on either side of the leaves that fall, he is compelled to take home a “trophy of the hour,” a coral-root flower. Man's will to commemorate, to inscribe his presence on the landscape, to provide himself with a history, goes on despite his essential insignificance, which is lost on him. In the final poem of the section, Acceptance , Frost's speaker proposes a response to the assault, though it is tinged with irony in light of the resistance mounted in surrounding poems: “Let what will be, be.”

A series of dark poems follow in the section appropriately titled Fiat Nox (Let there be darkness). Once by the Pacific , a poem written in 1893 that draws on Frost's childhood experience in San Francisco, registers the overwhelming power of nature arrayed against man, and the sound of the poem (it is in heroic couplets) suggests the tremendous “din” of the waves crashing into the land and threatening the future of man. The final lines, “There would be more than ocean water-broken / Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken,” suggests the apocalyptic force of the storm as it echoes Othello's speech before he murders Desdemona. In Bereft the speaker is again under assault by nature, the leaves imagined as striking out like a snake with “sinister” intent; the person ends in fear of his life, his faith seen as a poor defense in light of the extreme conditions in which he finds himself. In Acquainted with the Night , a sonnet that imitates the terza rima form of Dante, an individual descends into a kind of hell as he recounts his disconnection from others in a symbolic walk outside the city limits that is reminiscent of the walk taken in the earlier Good Hours . The framing of the poem—the first line, “I have been one acquainted with the night,” is also the last—suggests the hemmed-in nature of the speaker, who is isolated from both the natural and human worlds. Frost's melancholy moods find exquisite expression in these emotionally charged and intellectually sophisticated lyrics, which show the extent to which our psyche impacts our sense of the world around us.

The title poem is less personal and more philosophical, with the brook symbolizing the struggle against decline that is one of the themes running throughout the book. In the poem a husband and wife enter into conversation over a brook that runs west while most brooks run east to the ocean, a brook that contains “some strange resistance in itself.” That countercurrent is seen as trying to return to the water's source in an effort to overcome “the universal cataract of death”; it stands as a figure for the innate human drive to surmount the impulses of decay. The married couple sees an image of themselves in that counter movement: “It must be the brook / Can trust itself to go by contraries / The way I can with you—and you with me—.” They interpret the brook in different ways and are in some tension about it, but ultimately the poem ends in mutual accreditation. The progression by contraries in the brook becomes an emblem for the same gentle antagonism in a happy marriage—and for that matter, in Frost's versification—with the contraries of meter and rhythm producing a harmonious tune.

• A Further Range (1936)

Although A Further Range , Frost's sixth book of poetry, went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, it drew scathing attacks from leftist critics at the time of its publication for its conservative political cast. It is perhaps not surprising that the volume came under heavy fire, since Frost makes explicit his foray into “the realm of government”—always a controversial pursuit for an artist—in his epigraph. A Lone Striker is the first poem in the book and recalls Frost's experience in the mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, as a young man; it also registers the extent to which Frost has moved away from his early sympathy with the plight of mill workers. The tardy worker of the poem is locked out of the mill and so turns his back on it to pursue more spiritually and emotionally satisfying needs. As the subtitle of the poem ( Without Prejudice to Industry ) and the following lines attest, he is not interested in condemning industrial capitalism but rather is simply committed to establishing his personal independence from the machine:

The factory was very fine; He wished it all the modern speed. Yet, after all, 'twas not divine, That is to say, 'twas not a church. He never would assume that he'd Be any institution's need.

The rigid iambic tetrameter lines suggest the regularity of the run of the mill; his occasional lapses from it symbolize his extravagant decision to leave that regimented world behind rather than unite with the other workers in it.

Build Soil—A Political Pastoral , one of Frost's few long poems, takes up contemporary labor politics as well. Inspired by Virgil's First Eclogue , it is a dramatic dialogue that pits Tityrus, the farm-loving city poet, against Meliboeus, the shepherd-farmer; as the two men talk about the state of affairs in the city and on the farm, Meliboeus voices his belief “that the times seem revolutionary bad,” while Tityrus reassures. When the question of socialism arises, Tityrus argues against Meliboeus's idea that perhaps more of the world should be “Made good for everyone—things like inventions—/ Made so we all should get the good of them—/ All, not just great exploiting businesses.” Tityrus satirically dismisses such a notion and espouses a doctrine of laissez-faire. Exhorting Meliboeus to “build soil,” that is, to turn the soil over on itself for the purpose of enrichment, Tityrus insists on the importance of self-sufficiency, economic and otherwise. Dismissing the notion of collective political action, Tityrus, who represents Frost's own point of view, advocates an individualist response: “I bid you to a one-man revolution.”

Other antiliberal poems of A Further Range include Two Tramps in Mud Time , which weighs the social responsibility of a man chopping wood for pleasure when confronted by two tramps who want to take his “job for pay”; although the speaker concedes that “need” is a “better right” than “love,” he cautions against separating “avocation” and “vocation”:

Only where love and need are one, And the work is play for mortal stakes, Is the deed ever really done For Heaven and the future's sakes.

In A Roadside Stand Frost satirically jabs at the “greedy good-doers” of the federal government charged with relocating farmers “next to the theater and store,” in effect dissolving the distinction between the country and the city that Frost cherished. A Drumlin Woodchuck also carries political weight, as Frost figures through the woodchuck and his “strategic retreat” into his burrow his personal desire to escape the collectivizing force of the New Deal, to preserve his independence and intellectual vitality. On the Heart's Beginning to Cloud the Mind and The Figure in the Doorway , a pair of train poems, further seek to discredit the assumptions of liberal-minded people, in particular the view that those who appear destitute do in fact need or want help and pity. (Of course, the fact that Frost is evaluating these people from a train window suggests that his own examination of their lives is at best cursory.) Despite the bearings of these poems, Frost's political ideology is more complex than many of his critics have discerned, and at least two poems in the book, On Taking from the Top to Broaden the Base and Provide, Provide , call into question Frost's pat conservatism, as do some statements he made outside of his poems. (“They think I'm no New Dealer. But really and truly I'm not, you know, all that clear on it.”)

Some of Frost's best-known lyrics also appear in A Further Range , and in them he tries on a wide variety of meters and forms to suit his themes. Desert Places , a poem in quatrains that experiments with a complicated envelope rhyme, invokes a wasteland scenario as it figures the falling snow as a terrifying effacement of ego: “I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places.” Design , a modified Italian sonnet, questions whether there is any system at all in place that controls the operations of the universe; the frightening landscape of white that confronts the speaker leads him to an overwhelming question: “What but design of darkness to appall?—/ If design govern in a thing so small.” Neither Out Far Nor In Deep , a poem about the stubborn refusal on the part of humans to relinquish the pursuit of truth even in the face of their severe limitations, ends in the lines:

They cannot look out far. They cannot look in deep. But when was that ever a bar To any watch they keep?

These latter two poems, which connect with an earlier poem like An Old Man's Winter Night in Mountain Interval , led the literary critic Lionel Trilling , on the occasion of Frost's eighty-fifth birthday, to label him “a terrifying poet.” Although Trilling may have been trying overly hard to fit Frost into a modernist mold, it is true that some of his best poems insist on the frightening hollowness of interior and exterior landscapes. A Leaf Treader , written in a rare iambic heptameter, is a poem about the difficulty of survival spoken by someone in fear for his life:

They [the leaves] spoke to the fugitive in my heart as if it were leaf to leaf. They tapped at my eyelids and touched my lips with an invitation to grief. But it was no reason I had to go because they had to go. Now up my knee to keep on top of another year of snow.

In imitation of this theme, Frost's hyper-metrical lines (as measured against an iambic pentameter norm) depict the speaker's long, agonizing journey. The lines of There Are Roughly Zones also are stretched thin, with the syllable count in the iambic pentameter lines swelling well beyond the ten-syllable norm in an effort to illustrate visually the violation of zones, or boundaries, that is the subject of the poem.

• A Witness Tree (1942)

More of Frost's exquisite lyric poems grace A Witness Tree , and many of these are fueled by the traumas that Frost underwent in the years leading up to the publication of the book, including his daughter Marjorie's death in 1934 , his wife Elinor's death from cancer in 1938 , and his son Carol 's suicide in 1940 . A Witness Tree is dedicated to Kay Morrison, the woman who became Frost's secretary after Elinor's death and with whom it is believed he had a romantic relationship. A Witness Tree earned Frost his fourth Pulitzer Prize and includes Frost's further forays into the realm of contemporary politics.

William Pritchard ( 1984 ) has remarked on the beauty of the opening ten lyrics of the book, their depth of feeling and “aural inventiveness” that augments the messages they convey. In the first, The Silken Tent , Frost pays tribute to Kay, praising her delicate poise, although no woman ever appears in the poem. The metaphor of the tent “loosely bound / By countless silken ties of love and thought” is presented in a Shakespearean sonnet composed of only one sentence, a real feat of equipoise for the poet, and through it Frost comments on the careful plotting of lyric poetry, with the tent gently swaying in the breeze, bound but loosely, figuratively representing not only the woman of grace but also the formal lyric. In All Revelation Frost returns to one of his favorite themes: how much of the universe has been revealed to us and how we know when we have been afforded some special insight. The poem ends in the ironic declaration “All revelation has been ours,” as just how much we have learned through our intellectual probing is in question. Several first-person lyrics follow, perhaps most notable among them Come In , which arose in part from the feelings of grief Frost experienced in the wake of the deaths of his family members. Frost's speaker hears the music of a thrush, the conventional bird of elegy, in a dark wood, saying that it was “Almost like a call to come in / To the dark and lament.” However, he does not give in to that illusion and in the final quatrain bristles:

But no, I was out for stars: I would not come in. I meant not even if asked, And I hadn't been.

The three concluding poems of this sequence of ten suggest, as Richard Poirier ( 1977 ) has noted, “that consciousness is determined in part by the way one ‘reads’ the response of nature to human sound.” In The Most of It , yet another poem where Frost questions his relationship to the universe, the speaker desires something more from nature than his own echo, craving some form of “counter-love, original response.” Composed in elegiac (or heroic) quatrains (though without divisions between them), the heroic effort of the speaker is pointed up, as is the sadness of his condition, in his search for an answer to his call, which comes in the “embodiment” of “a great buck” crashing into the water in front of him. The poem ends in the enigmatic, “—and that was all,” a statement that leaves us guessing. Does it mean that the speaker is disappointed in what he finds? Or that he is satisfied by this response to his cries and will attempt to make the most of it? The next poem, a Shakespearean sonnet entitled Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same , pays mythological tribute to the tonal register of our common mother Eve, who lives, and will forever live, in the song of the birds: “Never again would birds' song be the same. / And to do that to birds was why she came.” Her presence in their song suggests that human meaning is in nature, thus providing us a means of relating to and interpreting our world. Finally, The Subverted Flower tells the story of a young man whose sexual advances to a woman are rebuffed, and both of them are turned into beasts by their thwarted sexual desire. Here human sound fails to inspire a world that would nurture love.

On the political side of the spectrum, The Gift Outright is one of Frost's most important public poems, being the one that he read at John F. Kennedy 's inauguration in 1961 . Frost said that the poem is about the American Revolution, and the tricky first line refers to the in-betweenness of colonial Americans: “The land was ours before we were the land's.” As Frost has it, we took physical possession of the land before we had given ourselves heart and soul to the land, since before the War of Independence, England remained our “home” (“we were England's, still colonials, / Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, / Possessed by what we now no more possessed”). The poem is a paean to manifest destiny, the divine right of the United States to become a transcontinental nation, and Frost is thereby led to erase all trace of the Native American presence from the landscape, calling it “unstoried, artless, unenhanced” until white Europeans left their mark upon it.

Other politically motivated poems occupy the end of the book, including The Lesson for Today , where Frost takes aim at leftists in America in the 1930s who believe that all the world's ills can and should be cured for once and all by the government; as the speaker of the poem sarcastically declares

Earth's a hard place in which to save the soul, And could it be brought under state control, So automatically we all were saved, Its separateness from Heaven could be waived; It might as well at once be kingdom-come. (Perhaps it will be next millennium.)

In Frost's play A Masque of Reason ( 1945 ), Job's Wife, in conversation with God, restates this belief: “Job says there's no such thing as Earth's becoming / An easier place for man to save his soul in.” As Frost believes, it is by being tested—through “the trial by existence”—that our triumphs become meaningful. In the section of the book entitled Time Out , a phrase that invokes apocalypse, Frost extends his critique of the political Left. In The Lost Follower he reworks The Lost Leader , Coleridge's poem about Wordsworth's increasing conservatism and the danger that poses to his poetry, ridiculing those who would leave the precincts of lyric verse for direct political action in their attempt to institute a new “Golden Age.” The ironic It Is Almost the Year 2000 , a poem Frost started writing in 1920 , similarly pokes fun at liberals who think that Armageddon is imminent by virtue of the terrible times.

• Steeple Bush (1947)

In his next book, Frost again engaged current affairs, with many of the poems either explicitly or implicitly about Cold War politics and culture. In One Step Backward Taken he imagines retreating from the onward rush of things (a recurrent figure), and it is telling that he wrote the poem on the brink of World War II, giving vent to his isolationist tendencies. In the Editorials section of the book, Frost weighs in most obviously on Cold War themes. In No Holy Wars for Them he muses on the subject of America's superpower status and the new geopolitics, humorously asserting that the smallest nations have been reduced to insignificance by the dawn of the nuclear age. In Bursting Rapture and U.S. King's X , Frost ironically imagines the effects of the atom bomb and, in the latter, the hypocritical attitude of the United States toward its future use, having already dropped it to end World War II. These are in keeping with the lyrics clustered together in the section Five Nocturnes , which express various human fears and strategies for survival in a dark universe, including a sarcastic treatment of those who believe the end of the world is near. In The Fear of God , the finest poem in the section entitled A Spire and Belfry , Frost recognizes his smallness in the world, expressing the need for humility (“Stay unassuming”) as he explains that we owe whatever successes we achieve in life to the “mercy” of “an arbitrary god.”

The centerpiece of the book is Directive , a poem that ropes together many of the ideas of Frost's previous work and offers a program for saving the self in the tumultuous present. In the poem a speaker travels back through history to a time of simplicity, finding at the end of his quest a brook that will secure his personal renewal. The desolate landscape resonates with others in Frost's verse as does the motif of retreat, and in the poem Frost builds on remarks in his 1939 essay The Figure a Poem Makes , where he describes poetry as “a momentary stay against confusion.” In his Letter to The Amherst Student ( 1935 ), he states similarly, “The background is hugeness and confusion shading away from where we stand into black and utter chaos; and against the background any small man-made figure of order and concentration. What pleasanter than that this should be so?” In Directive the speaker's discovery of “a broken drinking goblet like the Grail” in a children's playhouse is such a figure, one that allows for an act of redemption; as our guide instructs: “Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.” The goblet is “Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it, / So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't,” and this condition relates to that of poetry, as Frost suggests that the full meanings of poetry are hidden, ultimately open only to those readers at home in the metaphor.

• In the Clearing (1962)

In Frost's final book he returns to earlier themes even as he takes account of changing cultural conditions, and although these poems are perhaps not as spectacular as those in previous books, they indicate his continued concern for the emotional and ideological contours of our world. The final lyric, “In winter in the woods alone,” is perhaps most typical of Frost, as it presents a lone individual readying for assault, fully cognizant of his kinship to the natural world:

I see for Nature no defeat In one tree's overthrow Or for myself in my retreat For yet another blow.

In Escapist—Never , though, he makes clear that the retreat of which he speaks is not an escape from life but instead a gathering of forces for the direct confrontation with life that he—and all of us—eventually must make. There are some dark poems here too, including The Draft Horse , which stages a random act of violence when a man jumps out of the woods and stabs to death the horse that is taking the speaker to his destination. As Jay Parini ( 1999 ) has shown, the poem becomes a metaphor for the failure of poetic vision; depression, or lack of imagination, is the agent responsible for the crippling of the poet's creative force. His thoughts still on mortality, though with more humor, Frost's Away! plays with tone and with the notion of his demise (much as in the earlier Birches ) as he comes to the conclusion that

I may return If dissatisfied With what I learn From having died.

Finally, in his long poem Kitty Hawk , Frost is the most overtly autobiographical, tracing his flight into the Dismal Swamp of North Carolina after Elinor's initial rejection of him during their courtship and meditating on the flight of the Wright brothers, “the supreme merit” of “risking spirit in substantiation.” Indeed, the question of the interpenetration of matter and spirit lies at the heart of Frost's poetry and is something that Frost puzzled over all his life.

In addition to this personal terrain, Frost traverses the political as well, making his case variously for capitalism ( Pod of the Milkweed ), isolationism ( Does No One At All Ever Feel This Way in the Least ), and American democracy ( The Bad Island—Easter , America Is Hard to See , and his preface to The Gift Outright written for Kennedy's inauguration). In his long poem How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It's in You and in the Situation he further details his politics, linking his desire for a system of democratic checks and balances to the counterpointing of rhythm and meter in a poem. These figures of Frost's poetry and poetics have had a profound influence on successive poets, not only on American poets but on poets throughout the postcolonial world, as he has sought through them to negotiate the conflicting impulses within himself and in the world around him.

See also Nature Writing: Poetry

Selected Works

• New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes (1923)
• Selected Poems (1923)
• Collected Poems (1930)
• A Masque of Reason (1945)
• A Masque of Mercy (1947)
• Complete Poems (1949)

Further Reading

• Brodsky, Joseph , Seamus Heaney , and Derek Walcott . Homage to Robert Frost . New York, 1996. Three essays on the meaning and legacy of Frost's poetry and poetics as understood by three major transnational poets.
• Brower, Reuben . The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention . New York, 1963.
• Cady, Edwin H. , and Louis J. Budd , eds. On Frost: The Best from American Literature . Durham, N.C., 1991.
• Faggen, Robert . Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin . Ann Arbor, Mich., 1997.
• Faggen, Robert , ed. The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost . New York, 2002. A collection of essays on Frost in historical context, including discussions of his politics, formalism, regionalism, and classicism.
• Hoffman, Tyler . Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry . Hanover, N.H., 2001. A study of Frost's shifting politics and its relationship to his poetry and poetics.
• Kearns, Katherine . Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite . Cambridge, Mass., 1994.
• Kilcup, Karen L. Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition . Ann Arbor, Mich., 1998. An examination of Frost's response to New England women writers in the sentimental tradition.
• Parini, Jay . Robert Frost: A Life . New York, 1999. A thorough and accessible critical biography of the poet and his work that takes full account of previous biographical approaches.
• Poirier, Richard . Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing . Stanford, Calif., 1977. One of the most important and enduring critical treatments of Frost's poetry.
• Pritchard, William H. Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered . New York, 1984. An excellent critical biography of Frost that corrects the image of Frost as “monster” in Thompson's biography.
• Richardson, Mark . The Ordeal of Robert Frost . Urbana, Ill., 1997. An account of Frost's struggles with vocation and his links to the pragmatist philosophical tradition.
• Thompson, Lawrance . Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874–1915 . New York, 1966.
• Thompson, Lawrance . Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915–1938 . New York, 1970.
• Thompson, Lawrance , and R. H. Winnick . Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938–1963 . New York, 1976. Despite its biased view of Frost as hateful and mean-spirited, this three-volume biography contains a wealth of information on Frost's life and career.
• Walsh, John Evangelist . Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost . New York, 1988.

Related Articles

• Nature Writing: Poetry

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Article contents

Frost, robert.

• Stanley Burnshaw
• https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.1600598
• Published in print: 1999
• Published online: February 2000

Robert Frost.

Frost, Robert ( 26 March 1874–29 January 1963 ), poet , was born Robert Lee Frost in San Francisco to Isabelle Moodie, of Scottish birth, and William Prescott Frost, Jr., a descendant of a Devonshire Frost who had sailed to New Hampshire in 1634. The father was a former teacher turned newspaper man, a hard drinker, a gambler, and a harsh disciplinarian, who fought to succeed in politics for as long as his health allowed. In the wake of his death (as a consumptive) in his thirty-sixth year, his impoverished widow, with the help of funds from her father-in-law, moved east. She resumed her teaching career in the fall of 1885 in Salem, New Hampshire, where Robert and his younger sister were enrolled in the fifth-grade class. Soon he was playing baseball, trapping animals, climbing birches. And his mother, who had filled his early years with Shakespeare, Bible stories, and myths, was reading aloud from Tom Brown’s School Days , Burns, Ralph Waldo Emerson , Wordsworth, and Percy’s Reliques . Before long he was memorizing poetry and reading books on his own.

Frost’s high school years in Lawrence, Massachusetts, marked a further change. Greek and Latin delighted him; at the end of the first year he was head of his class. An older student, Carl Burell, introduced him to botany and astronomy. More important, Frost became a promising writer: his poem “La Noche Triste,” inspired by William H. Prescott ’s History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), appeared in the April 1890 issue of the high school Bulletin , of which he was soon made editor. He joined the debating society, played on the football team, and again was head of his class. At the beginning of his senior year he fell in love with Elinor White, who had also published poetry in the Bulletin . On commencement day (1892) they shared valedictory honors and, before summer ended, pledged themselves to each other in a secret ritual.

In the fall they went their separate ways: Elinor to St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, Frost to Dartmouth on a scholarship and with his grandfather’s aid. Though he relished his courses in Latin and Greek and his own wide reading of English verse, in particular Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language , the campus life dismayed him. Isolated and restless, he quit at the end of December, being needed, he said, to take over his mother’s unruly eighth-grade class. He was nursing the hope that Elinor might give up school to marry him, but when she returned in April his attempts to persuade her failed.

After working for months as a trimmer of lamps in a woolen mill in Lawrence, Frost turned to teaching in grade school, while also writing poetry. At the end of the term, startling news greeted him: the New York Independent had accepted “My Butterfly: An Elegy,” with a stipend of $15. His first professionally published poem would appear in November—he could earn his living as a writer! Once again he implored Elinor to marry him; once again she refused. Convinced there was now another suitor, he engaged a printer to make two leather-bound, gold-stamped copies of Twilight , each containing five of his poems. He took the train to Canton, knocked at her door, and handed her his gift. The inimically cool reception hurled him into despair. Pained and distraught, he destroyed his copy and went home. Still distraught, on 6 November he set out for the Dismal Swamp in Virginia—to throw his life away? punish Elinor? make her relent? On 30 November 1894, frightened and worn, he was back in Lawrence. Before long he became a reporter, then returned to teaching. Elinor, having finished college, also taught in his mother’s private school. Then at long last, on 19 December 1895, they were married by a Swedenborgian pastor. Nine months later, Elliot, a son, was born.

They both kept working as teachers, and Frost kept publishing poems. In the fall of 1897, thanks to his grandfather’s loan, Frost, at age twenty-three, entered Harvard in the hope of becoming a high school teacher of Latin and Greek. Certain courses proved meaningful, most of all in the classics and geology, but also in philosophy with Hugo Münsterberg , who assigned Psychology: Briefer Course by William James , Frost’s “greatest inspiration,” then absent on leave. In March 1899, however, severe chest and stomach pains combined with worries about his ailing mother and pregnant wife forced him to leave Harvard.

Medical warnings—the threat of tuberculosis—drove Frost from the indoor life of teaching. In May 1900, with his grandfather’s help, he rented a poultry farm in Methuen. Two months later, Elliot, the Frosts’ three-year-old, became gravely ill with cholera infantum ; on 8 July he died. Frost flailed himself for not having summoned a doctor in time, believing that God was punishing him by taking his child away. Elinor, silent for days, at last let fly at him for his “self-centered senselessness” in believing that any such thing as a god’s benevolent concern for human affairs could exist; life was hateful and the world evil, but with a fourteen-month-old daughter, Lesley, to care for, they would have to go on. And when their landlord ordered them to leave by fall, Elinor took matters in hand. She persuaded Grandfather Frost to buy for their use the thirty-acre farm that her mother had found in Derry, New Hampshire, and to arrange, in addition, for Carl Burell, Frost’s high school friend, to move in to help with the chores.

The “Derry Years” (1900–1911) were especially creative ones, bringing forth—complete or in draft—nearly all of A Boy’s Will (1913), much, if not most, of North of Boston (1914), many poems of Mountain Interval (1916), as well as some that appeared in each of his later books. Yet at times in the first two years he was deeply depressed: in November 1900 his mother died; in July 1901, his other firm supporter, Grandfather Frost. But the latter’s will bequeathed to his grandson an immediate annuity of $500 and after ten years an annuity of $800 and the deed to the Derry property.

Frost continued to write at night: poems and articles for poultry journals. He enjoyed working the farm by day and learning about the countryside and the lives of its people. By 1906, though fairly well off compared to his neighbors, yet with four children under seven, he was pressed for money. With the aid of a pastor-friend and a school trustee who admired his poems, he obtained a position at the nearby Pinkerton Academy, which he held with outstanding success. A pedagogic original, he introduced a conversational classroom style. He directed students in plays he adapted from Marlowe, Milton, Sheridan, and Yeats. He revised the English curriculum. And besides teaching seven classes a day, he helped with athletics, the student paper, and the debating team. At the end of five years, utterly exhausted, he resigned.

In the fall of 1911 he was teaching again, part time in the Plymouth, New Hampshire, Normal School. But in December he announced to his editor-friend at the Independent , Susan Ward, that “the long deferred forward movement you have been living in wait for is to begin next year.” In July 1912 he started making plans for a radical change of scene. When he suggested England to Elinor as “the place to be poor and to write poems, ‘Yes,’ she cried, ‘let’s go over and live under thatch.’ ”

On 2 September 1912 the Frosts arrived in London. They stayed there briefly before moving into “The Bungalow” in Beaconsfield, where they would live for eighteen months. Elinor, charmed by the “dear little cottage” and its long grassy yard, strolled the countryside with the children; Frost traveled at will to London—forty minutes by train—roaming the streets, the bookshops, “everywhere.” Before long he was finishing the manuscript of A Boy’s Will that he had brought to England and adding a few new poems. In October the book was accepted by David Nutt for publication the following March.

Through the next few months Frost was seized by a powerful surge of creativity, producing twelve or more lengthy poems, each strikingly different from the brooding narratives of A Boy’s Will : dialog-narratives in a style of “living” speech new to the language, exploring the inward lives of ordinary people in the New England countryside. By April 1913, most of (if not all) the poems that would constitute North of Boston had been written.

At the January 1913 opening of Monro’s Poetry Bookshop Frost was urged by the poet Frank Flint to call on Ezra Pound (whom he had never heard of), a reviewer for various journals. Frost waited until 13 March, about a week before A Boy’s Will was to appear. At Pound’s insistence, they walked to the publisher’s office for a copy. On their return, Pound started reading at once, then told his guest to “run along home” so he could write his review for Poetry , a new American monthly. In the next few weeks, thanks to Pound and Flint, Frost came to meet some of the best-known writers then living in England, including Yeats, H.D. ( Hilda Doolittle ), Richard Aldington, and Ford Madox Ford.

A Boy’s Will , finally issued on 1 April 1913, elicited favorable but qualified reviews. Chronicling the growth of a youth from self-centered idealism to maturity and acceptance of loss, the thirty-two lyrics offered few hints of the masterful volumes to come, except for those in “Mowing,” “Storm Fear,” and scattered passages. Yeats pronounced the poetry “the best written in America for some time,” leading Elinor to “hope”—in vain—that “he would say so publicly.” Happily, in the fall, on his return from a family vacation in Scotland, Frost was greeted by two extraordinary tributes in the Nation and the Chicago Dial and a superb review in the Academy .

During the next few months, Frost came to know the writers Robert Bridges, Walter de la Mare, W. H. Davies, and Ralph Hodgson; the Georgian poets Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Gibson, Lascelles Abercrombie; and the essayist and poet Edward Thomas, who would become his bosom friend. With Flint and T. E. Hulme he discussed poetics, having spoken in letters to his Pinkerton friends John Bartlett and Sidney Cox of “the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre” and “the sentence sound [that] often says more than the words.” He also wrote that he wanted not “a success with the critical few” but “to get outside to the general reader who buys books by the thousands.”

In April, badly strained for funds, Frost moved his family 100 miles northwest of London to an ancient cottage, not far from Abercrombie’s and Gibson’s, in the rolling Gloucestershire farmland near Dymock. On 15 May North of Boston appeared, to be hailed in June by important reviews, particularly those by Abercrombie (“there will never be,” said Frost, “any other just like it”), Ford Madox Ford (“an achievement much finer than Whitman’s”), Richard Aldington (“it would be very difficult to overpraise it”), and Edward Thomas (“Only at the end of the best pieces, such as ‘The Death of the Hired Man,’ ‘Home Burial,’ ‘The Black Cottage,’ and ‘The Wood-pile,’ do we realize that they are masterpieces of a deep and mysterious tenderness”). By August, Frost’s reputation as a leading poet had been firmly established in England, and Henry Holt of New York had agreed to publish his books in America. By the end of 1914, however, financial need forced him to leave Britain.

When Frost and his family returned to the United States in February, he was hailed as a leading voice of the “new poetry” movement. Holt’s editor introduced him to the staff of the New Republic , which had just published a favorable review of North of Boston , and Tufts College invited him to be its Phi Beta Kappa poet. Before the year’s end, he had met with Edwin Arlington Robinson , William Dean Howells , Louis Untermeyer (who would become his intimate friend), Ellery Sedgwick of the Atlantic Monthly , and other literary figures. In the following year he was made Phi Beta Kappa poet at Harvard and elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Mountain Interval , which appeared in November 1916, offered readers some of his finest poems, such as “Birches,” “Out, Out—,” “The Hill Wife,” and “An Old Man’s Winter Night.”

Frost’s move to Amherst in 1917 launched him on the twofold career he would lead for the rest of his life: teaching whatever “subjects” he pleased at a congenial college (Amherst, 1917–1963, with interruptions; the University of Michigan, 1921–1923, 1925–1926; Harvard, 1939–1943; Dartmouth, 1943–1949) and “barding around,” his term for “saying” poems in a conversational performance. Audiences flocked to listen to the “gentle farmer-poet” whose platform manner concealed the ever-troubled, agitated private man who sought through each of his poems “a momentary stay against confusion.” In the great short lyrics of New Hampshire (1923) and West-Running Brook (1928)—such as “Fire and Ice,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and the title poem of the latter book—a bleak outlook on life persuasively emerges from the combination of dramatic tension and nature imagery freighted with ambiguity. Only the will to create form, the poet in effect says, can stave off the nothingness that confronts us as mortal beings.

In 1930 Frost won a second Pulitzer Prize for Collected Poems —the first had been won by New Hampshire —and in the next few years, other prizes and honors, including the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry at Harvard. However, when A Further Range appeared in 1936, several influential leftist critics, unaware that Frost had “twice been approached” by the New Masses “to be their proletarian poet,” attacked him for his conservative political views, ignoring the bitter meanings in “Provide, Provide” and such master poems as “Desert Places,” “Design,” and “Neither Out Far nor In Deep.” A Further Range earned him a third Pulitzer Prize in May 1937. Ten months later, on 26 March 1938, Elinor died and his world collapsed. Four years before, in the wake of their daughter Marjorie’s death, they had helped each other bear the grief. Alone now, wracked in misery and guilty over his sometimes insensitive behavior toward Elinor, he hoped to find calm through his children, but Lesley’s ragings only deepened his pain. For some time he continued to teach, then resigned his position, sold his Amherst house, and returned to his farm. In July Theodore Morrison invited him to speak at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference in August. Frost’s lectures enthralled his listeners, but at times his erratic public behavior drew worried attention. To the great relief of his friends, Kathleen Morrison, the director’s wife, stepped in to offer him help with his affairs. He accepted at once and made her his official secretary-manager.

Weeks before, however, Kathleen had called at his farm to invite him to visit her at a nearby summer house. Before long he proposed marriage, but she insisted on secrecy, on maintaining appearances. “We wanted to marry,” he told Stanley Burnshaw, his editor in the 1960s. “It was all decided. But you know how matters seem at times—others to think of … It was thought best,” he repeated, “It was thought best”—marriage without benefit of clergy, an altered way of life. He continued to bard around and to teach, residing from January through March at “Pencil Pines,” his newly built Miami retreat; at his Cambridge house until late May; then in Ripton, near Breadloaf, for the summer; and in Cambridge again through December.

During the 1940s Frost published four new books: A Witness Tree (1942), inscribed “To K.M./For Her Part in It,” containing some of his finest poems, among them “The Most of It” and “The Silken Tent,” and for which he received his fourth Pulitzer Prize; two deceptively playful blank verse dialogs, A Masque of Reason (1945) and A Masque of Mercy (1947), on the relationship between God and man, to be “taken” in light of his statements on “irony . . . a kind of guardedness” and “style … the way the man takes himself … If it is with outer humor, it must be with inner seriousness”; and fourth, Steeple Bush (1947), his weakest volume, although it included “Directive,” one of Frost’s major poems. None but his intimates knew of the decade’s griefs: his son Carol’s suicide in 1940, his daughter Irma’s placement in a mental hospital in 1947.

In the last fourteen years of his life Frost was the most highly esteemed American poet of the twentieth century, having received forty-four honorary degrees and a host of government tributes, including birthday greetings from the Senate, a congressional medal, an appointment as honorary consultant to the Library of Congress, and an invitation from John F. Kennedy to recite a poem at his presidential inauguration. Thrice, at the State Department’s request, he traveled on good-will missions: to Brazil (1954), to Britain (1957), and to Greece (1961, on his return from Israel, where he had lectured at the Hebrew University).

More important for Frost as an artist and for his readers were the changed perceptions of his works, which began with Randall Jarrell ’s 1947 essay “The Other Frost.” Jarrell saw him as “the subtlest and saddest of poets” whose “extraordinary strange poems express an attitude that, at its most extreme, makes pessimism a hopeful evasion.” Twelve years later Lionel Trilling hailed Frost at his eighty-fifth birthday dinner for his “representation of the terrible actualities of life in a new way,” for though “the manifest America of [his] poems may be pastoral, the actual America is tragic.” And two years earlier, in London at the English-Speaking Union, T. S. Eliot (who in 1922 had dismissed Frost’s verse as “unreadable”) toasted him as “perhaps the most eminent, the most distinguished Anglo-American poet now living,” whose “kind of local feeling in poetry … can go without universality: the relation of Dante to Florence, … of Robert Frost to New England.”

In the Clearing , Frost’s ninth and last collection of poems, appeared on 26 March 1962, the date of his eighty-eighth birthday dinner in Washington, attended by some 200 guests who heard Justices Earl Warren and Felix Frankfurter , Adlai Stevenson , Mark Van Doren , and Robert Penn Warren speak in his honor. Five months later, at the president’s request, Frost made a twelve-day trip to the USSR, where he met with fellow writers and with Premier Nikita Khrushchev. On his return, “bone tired” and exhausted after eighteen sleepless hours, he made some ill-considered public remark, which was taken as a slur on both Khrushchev and President Kennedy. To Frost’s deep dismay, the president did not receive him.

On 2 December at the Ford Forum Hall in Boston Frost made his last address and, though admitting he felt a bit tired, he stayed the evening through. In the morning he felt much too ill to keep his doctor’s appointment. After considerable wrangling, he agreed to enter a hospital “for observation and tests.” He remained in its care until his death in the early hours of 29 January 1963. Tributes poured in from all over the land and from abroad. A small private service on the 31st at Harvard’s Memorial Church for family members and friends was followed by a public one on 17 February at the Amherst College Chapel, where 700 guests listened to Mark Van Doren’s recital of eleven Frost poems he had chosen for the occasion. Eight months later, at the October dedication of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst, President Kennedy paid tribute to the poetry, to “its tide that lifts all spirits,” and to the poet “whose sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation.”

Within a decade, however, the poet’s public image was shattered by the appearance of the second volume of Lawrance Thompson’s authorized biography, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915–1937 (1970), which reviewers took at face value to be an accurate account of a man whom Helen Vendler deemed a “monster of egotism” ( New York Times Book Review , 9 Aug. 1970). Although Frost later came to have grave misgivings about his choice, he had designated Thompson his official biographer in 1939. For whatever reason, the poet felt unable to renounce that decision despite his awareness of Thompson’s frequently unsympathetic, even hostile constructions of his attitudes and conduct. Although reviewers perceived in Thompson, as Vendler put it, “an affectation of fairness,” they tended to subscribe, nevertheless, to the “monster-myth” that poisoned Frost’s reputation. Evidence that he was not a wrecker of others’ lives was soon at hand in the form of The Family Letters of Robert and Elinor Frost , edited by Arnold Grade (1972). More than a decade would pass before the tide was turned: first by W. H. Pritchard’s Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (1984) and then by Stanley Burnshaw’s Robert Frost Himself (1986), which enabled Publishers’ Weekly to state that “the unfortunately influential ‘monster-myth’ stands here convincingly corrected.”

Bibliography

Significant collections of Frost materials are in the Jones Library in Amherst, Mass., Amherst College Library, Dartmouth College Library, University of Virginia Library, and University of Texas Library, Austin. In addition to the volumes by Frost cited in the text above, editions of his writings include Collected Poems, Prose & Plays , ed. Richard Poirier and Mark S. Richardson (1995), and “The Collected Prose of Robert Frost,” ed. M. S. Richardson (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers Univ., 1993). Additional correspondence appears in Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer , ed. Louis Untermeyer (1963), and Selected Letters of Robert Frost , ed. Lawrance Thompson, 1964. Frost’s spoken words are transcribed in Robert Frost Speaks , ed. Daniel Smythe (1964); Robert Frost, Life and Talks-Walking , ed. Louis Mertins (1965); Interviews with Robert Frost , ed. E. C. Lathem (1966); Robert Frost: A Living Voice , ed. Reginald Cook (1974); and Newdick’s Season of Frost , ed. William Sutton (1976).

Biographical materials include L. Thompson’s typescript “Notes on Robert Frost” (1962; Alderman Library, Univ. of Virginia); Sidney Cox, A Swinger of Birches , with an introduction by Robert Frost (1957); Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence (1960); Margaret Bartlett Anderson, Robert Frost and John Bartlett: The Record of a Friendship (1963); F. D. Reeve, Robert Frost in Russia (1964); Wade Van Dore, Robert Frost and Wade Van Dore , rev. and ed. Thomas Wetmore (1987); John E. Walsh, Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost (1988); and Lesley Lee Francis (his granddaughter), The Frost Family’s Adventure in Poetry (1994). In addition to The Years of Triumph volume discussed above, L. Thompson’s official biography comprises Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874–1915 (1966) and Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938–1963 , with R. H. Winnick (1976). Assessments and criticism of note include Richard Thornton, ed., Recognition of Robert Frost (1937); Reuben Brower, The Poetry of Robert Frost (1963); Jac Tharpe, ed., Frost: Centennial Essays (3 vols., 1974–1978); R. Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977); and M. S. Richardson, The Ordeal of Robert Frost: The Poet and His Poetics (1997).

Online Resources

• Robert Frost http://www.poets.org/lit/poet/rfrosfst.htm From the Academy of American Poets.
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882), lecturer and author
• Prescott, William Hickling (1796-1859), historian
• Münsterberg, Hugo (1863-1916), psychologist
• James, William (1842-1910), philosopher and psychologist
• Pound, Ezra (1885-1972), poet and critic
• Doolittle, Hilda (1886-1961), poet and novelist
• Holt, Henry (1840-1926), book publisher
• Robinson, Edwin Arlington (1869-1935), poet
• Howells, William Dean (1837-1920), author
• Untermeyer, Louis (1885-1977), poet and anthologist
• Sedgwick, Ellery (27 February 1872–21 April 1960), magazine editor
• Kennedy, John Fitzgerald (29 May 1917–22 November 1963), thirty-fifth president of the United States
• Jarrell, Randall (1914-1965), poet and critic
• Trilling, Lionel (1905-1975), literary critic and author
• Eliot, T. S. (26 September 1888–04 January 1965), poet, critic, and editor
• Warren, Earl (1891-1974), chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, governor of California, and attorney general of California
• Frankfurter, Felix (15 November 1882–22 February 1965), associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
• Stevenson, Adlai Ewing, II (1900-1965), governor, diplomat, and two-time candidate for president
• Van Doren, Mark (13 June 1894–10 December 1972), writer and professor of English
• Warren, Robert Penn (24 April 1905–15 September 1989), author and educator

Related articles in Companion to United States History on Oxford Reference

More on this topic.

• Frost, Robert, (26 March 1874–29 Jan. 1963), Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, since 1958; Member of American Academy of Arts and Letters; Member of American Philosophical Society; George Ticknor Fellow in Humanities, Dartmouth College in Who Was Who
• Frost, Robert in Oxford Music Online

External resources

• Library of Congress Poets Laureate

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Robert Frost

Robert Lee Frost, mostly known as Robert Frost was born on the 26 th of March in San Francisco, a Californian city. He was a bright child of William Prescott Frost, a renowned journalist, while his mother, Isabelle Moodie, was a Scottish immigrant. His father worked as a teacher for many years. Robert’s father was also an unsuccessful candidate for a city tax collector. Sadly, William died due to tuberculosis in 1885, when Frost was just eleven years old. After his father’s demise, the family moved to eastern Massachusetts to stay with their grandparents.

Robert Lee Frost attended Lawrence High School and graduated in 1892 as a valedictorian poet. It was there he learned character types, distinctive speech patterns , and regional customs. Right after graduation, he attended Dartmouth College, where he became a member of Theta Delta Chi Fraternity . Later, in 1897 he attended Harvard University, but unfortunately, he was dropped out twice due to his fragile health. Later, he received his Master of Arts in 1918 and his doctoral degrees from Oxford and Cambridge in 1957. Throughout his educational career, he remained a brilliant student. He used to share his ideas with Elinor White and later fell in love with her. He started his writing career at high school, while his first professional publication, “My Butterfly: An Elegy ” appeared in The Independent , a weekly literary journal.

Married Life

Robert Lee Frost married Elinor White, with whom he shared his valedictorian honors. The couple got married in 1895 after which Frost tried his luck in the teaching profession. He spent two years at Harvard but could not complete his degree. It was difficult for him to raise a family. Therefore, he tried his hands on chicken farming at Methuen, Massachusetts. Unfortunately, that business also met failure. Another calamity hit when his children died. Despite failures, loss, and frustrations in business and life, Robert never gave up and pursued his interest in poetry resolutely.

Robert Frost continued his efforts and kept on polishing his abilities throughout his life. His untiring efforts and magical pen won matchless popularity for him. After passing a ripe career, this iconic figure breathed his last on the 29 th of January 1963 at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital.

Some Important Facts of His Life

• President John F. Kennedy invited him to his 1961 Presidential Inauguration to read his poem , “Dedication.”
• The epitaph on his tombstone has been taken from his own poem.
• He won Pulitzers Prize for his literary efforts four times, while no other poet has yet managed to supersede him.

Writing Career

Robert Frost’s life was marred by a series of tragedies . First, the early demise of his father, later the deaths of his children, and then the loss in business. However, all these hindrances could not destroy his writing talent. He graduated from Lawrence High School as a poet but could not polish his poetic abilities due to the unfavorable luck. His first poem, “My Butterfly: An Elegy” was published in 1894. Various poets such as Robert Graves, Edward Thomas, and Robert Brooke used to meet him and encourage him to write poetry. During his visit to England, he became friends with Ezra Pound , who later helped him in his publications. He published “A Boy’s Will” in 1913.  Later, in 1916, in his book “Mountain Interval” he presented a perfect combination of narratives and lyrics in his poetry. “Selected Poems” and “New Hampshire” hit the shelves in 1923. He became so much popular with his simplicity in poetry that it earned him four Pulitzer Prizes. Besides poetry, he produced the updated version of Biblical story , A Masque of Mercy , in 1947. Furthermore, he was the first poet honored to recite a poem at the Presidential Inauguration of John F. Kennedy.

Robert Frost added more colors to the world of literature. Despite having a traumatic life, he secured a reputable place as a literary man with his creative and thoughtful ideas. The early demise of his father and his children provided him with an insight to feel the intense pain of loss and express it in simple and ordinary language. He documented these ideas in his poems and plays so well, such as “After Apple-Picking”, “Mending Wall” and “Out- Out” have become household names on account of their deceptively innocent themes .

Moreover, his ideas about social outcasts and love for nature are reflected well in his works. The recurring themes in most of his poems are love, death, beauty , man and the natural world, and struggle. Robert Frost used literary devices that turned to visual and sensual imagery , metaphors , similes , and symbolism to create a unique style .

Robert Frost’s Works

• Best Poems : His popular poems include: “After Apple-Picking”, “Mending Wall”, “ Birches ”, “Out-Out”, “ Fire and Ice ”, Nothing Gold Can Stay ” and “ Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening .”
• Best Plays and Prose Books: His famous books and plays include: “A Way Out: A One-Act Play “, “ A Masque of Reason  “, “A Masque of Mercy”, “The Notebooks of Robert Frost, edited by Robert Faggen”, “Selected Letters of Robert Frost.”

Robert Frost’s Impact on Future Literature

Robert Frost was a classical writer who started writing at a young age and became very popular during his lifetime. His literary qualities and unique expressions have added so much to the world of literature . Even during his lifetime, Frost has had a significant influence on a diverse range of writers and poets. His works are widely anthologized and taught in different syllabuses across the world for their simplicity, universality, and ordinariness. He successfully brought into light the concept of soothing nature and its role in man’s life. He expressed his ideas in his poems. His poems are very much an inspiration to modern times to this day. Many modern poets attempt to imitate his style, considering him a role model for writing prose and poetry.

Famous Quotes

• “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference.”( The Road Not Taken , Poem)
• “Some say the earth will end in fire, Some say in ice.” (Fire and Ice)
• “I have been one acquainted with the night . I have walked out in rain – and back in rain. I have out walked the furthest city light. I have looked down the saddest city lane.” (Acquainted with the Night )

Related posts:

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• Frost at Midnight
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• Miles to Go Before I Sleep
• The Road Not Taken
• Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
• Acquainted with the Night
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Robert Frost: Darkness or Light?

By Joshua Rothman

Fifty years ago today, the poet Robert Lee Frost died, at the age of eighty-eight. Though Frost is thought of as a contemplative New England poet, he was born in San Francisco, and named for the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. As Raymond Holden explained in his 1931 New Yorker Profile of Frost , Frost’s father, William, was “an ardent Democrat and States’ Rights man.” Father Frost had tried to enlist in the Civil War on the Southern side, but was rejected because he was too young. “By the time Robert was born,” Holden writes, “the elder Frost was booming around San Francisco in a top hat, whooping up everything that was Democratic and belittling everything that wasn’t.” The young Robert Lee Frost grew up in politics; William Frost wrote for the San Francisco Bulletin , where a political enemy once took a shot at him through the window. “Around election time, the boy’s father used to dress him up in fancy costume and make him ride on floats in political parades or pound along in some torchlight procession getting sparks in his hair. Once when Father Frost was running for the office of something like tax-collector, Robert tagged around after him into all the saloons, helping to tack up election placards.”

It’s hard to imagine the author of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”—the watcher of trees and grass, of frozen lakes and forested darkness—pinning up political posters in a crowded San Francisco bar. But, while the personality that comes through in Frost’s poems was a genuine one, it was also edited. Frost the poet seems like a quiet person, a loner. But, Holden reports, Frost the man would often “sit up late and talk, eating apples, gossiping about everyone and everything, a little maliciously sometimes but always brilliantly and soundly.” Frost liked long walks in the mountains, but he also liked “sea chanteys, sports, the theatre.” He liked “to talk and read about scientific achievements and exploration.” (In “ A Visit to Camelot ,” her wildly entertaining memoir of a White House dinner she attended in 1962, for that year’s Nobel laureates, Diana Trilling writes, “Out of the corner of my eye I had spotted Colonel John Glenn. He was talking to, of all people, Robert Frost, and there must have been six people huddled around them, trying to hear what they were saying.”)

There was, Holden writes, a “strength and vividness” to Frost in person, which you would be unaware of if you only knew his poems, as they lacked “the very quality which makes him most noticeable as a personality. It is as if that quality were kept out—frequently, but certainly not always—by some strangely generated sense of reserve.” In his poetry, Frost emphasized the part of himself that remained aloof and on the outside. He was like “a very keen-witted boy,” Holden says, “who would rather know how to sharpen an axehead than sharpen it, who would rather know where spruce gum comes from than go and gather it.” Active with one part of himself—playing baseball, clearing brush, trudging through the woods looking for wildflowers—he was also always watching and weighing. He was talking with you but he was also attending to the patterns of your speech, listening for a poetic rhythm.

While Holden seems to have thought of Frost as an essentially cheerful person who from time to time stepped away from that cheerfulness for the purposes of composing poetry, Joseph Brodsky came to the opposite conclusion. That reserve, he argued, actually represented the real Frost. The rest was just window dressing.

Frost, Brodsky writes, in “ On Grief and Reason ,” his 1994 essay for The New Yorker , “is generally regarded as the poet of the countryside, of rural settings—as a folksy, crusty, wisecracking old gentleman farmer, generally of positive disposition.” He “greatly enhanced this notion by projecting precisely this image of himself in numerous public appearance and interviews”—like Holden’s, one imagines. In reality, Brodsky writes, Frost was a dark, “terrifying” poet, as Lionel Trilling had called him. He was a poet animated by “anticipation,” by a knowledge of “what he is capable of,” by a sense “of his own negative potential.” Frost’s life contained much besides contemplative strolls through the New England countryside, but Brodsky argued that in that countryside, Frost had seen the most profound part of himself. In nature, Frost had painted his “terrifying self-portrait.”

Look again, Brodsky suggests, at “Come In”—the title poem to a collection that was printed in a special Armed Services Edition for U.S. soldiers. In the poem, a man approaches the edge of the woods. He can hear, somewhere in the trees, the singing of a thrush, but the woods are shadowed, the bird is hidden:

Too dark in the woods for a bird By sleight of wing To better its perch for the night, Though it could still sing.

“Far in the pillared dark,” the poem continues, “Thrush music went— / Almost like a call to come in / To the dark and lament.” But the poet, who is “out for stars,” refuses. “I would not come in,” he says,

I meant not even if asked, and I hadn’t been.

It sounds like an affirming, resolute poem: walking in the woods, he feels a shiver, then walks on. But don’t believe those final lines, Brodsky tells us, with their “jocular vehemence.” Don’t be deceived by the idea that the poet is “out for stars,” and that he can turn so easily away from those woods. That’s Frost’s usual poetic sleight of hand—his usual front of “positive sensibility.” “If he was indeed ‘out for stars,’ ” Brodsky asks, “why didn’t he mention that before?” Almost certainly, he’s standing at the edge of the woods in the first place because part of him wants to be there—to “make a meal” of his own “dreadful apprehension.” The poet has invited himself, in short, to the edge of the woods, and, once there, he is trying to quell his own impulses; he is “shielding himself from his own insights.” “The twenty lines of the poem,” Brodsky concludes, “constitute the title’s translation. And in this translation, I am afraid, the expression ‘come in’ means ‘die.’”

Personally, I love Brodsky’s reading of Frost. Frost, he thought, wanted to explore the tension, or the connection, between “grief and reason”—the grief of the thrush in the woods, and the reason of the poet stepping back from them. Grief and reason, he writes, are

language’s most efficient fuel—or, if you will, poetry’s indelible ink. Frost’s reliance on them… almost gives you the sense that his dipping into this inkpot had to do with the hope of reducing the level of its contents; you detect a sort of vested interest on his part. Yet the more one dips into it, the more it brims with this black essence of existence, and the more one’s mind, like one’s fingers, gets soiled by this liquid. For the more there is of grief, the more there is of reason.

This captures perfectly what so many of us love about Frost: his delicious indecision; his reluctant normalcy; his dark energy. His most famous lines may well be “The woods are lovely, dark and deep. / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.” Some of death’s terrifying force, his poetry suggests, might be borrowed, and used, for the purposes of life.

Photograph: Library of Congress.

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Robert Frost

Robert Frost (Robert Lee Frost) was an American Poet. Before his works were published in America, they were published in England. Frost is known for his accurate description of country life and his grasp on the colloquial speech of America. Frost wrote about the rural life of New England in the early 20 th century. He used the settings of New England to analyze the philosophical and complex social themes.

Frost was admired and honored for his poetry. He is the only poet who received four Pulitzer Prizes in Poetry. He turned out to be one of the rare literary figures of America who was almost an artistic institution. In 1960, he was honored with the Congressional Gold Medal for his poetry. He was named as poet laureate of Vermont on 22 nd July 1961. 

A Short Biography of Robert Frost

Robert Frost was born on 26 th August 1874 to William Prescott, Jr. and Isabelle Moodie Frost. His father, William, was a journalist and was ambitious to make his career in California. He has only one sister Jeanie Frost. In 1885, his father died, and his mother shifted to Lawrence, Massachusetts, with her two children. The children were taken by the paternal grandparents of Robert and grew up in Lawrence, whereas his mother started teaching at different schools in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In 1892, Robert graduated from high school. He was a top student in the class and shared his valediction honors with his beloved Elinor White.

Both Elinor and Robert shared interest in poetry; however, they were separated as Robert continued his education at Dartmouth College, and Elinor went to St. Lawrence University. The poetic career Robert had started in high school was continued by him. He published his first poem, My Butterfly: An Elegy” in 1894 in a weekly journal, The Independent. Frost left Dartmouth College before the completion of his first year because of the tiring academic routine. 

In 1985, he married Elinor. However, life was difficult, and Robert started teaching and farming to support his family. His fields of career did not meet any notable success. In the following twelve years, they had six children. Two of the children died at an early age. In 1897, Robert resumed his education at Harvard University and left the university after two years. From1900 to 1909, the family started poultry on a farm in New Hampshire; Frost also started teaching at the Pinkerton Academy in Derry. Frost turned into an ambitious botanist and attained his poetic identity of a rural sage of New England during these years. He was writing poetry during the time, but the publishing opening shows that he did not have much interest in it.

Frost was struggling against the discouragement by 1911. For him, poetry was regarded as a game of a young person. Whereas Frost, who was almost 40 years old, could not publish a book and only had published a few handfuls of poems in magazines. In 1911, Frost got ownership of the Derry farm. He made a sudden decision to sell the farm and started a new life in London. To him, the publishers in London were more approachable to new talent than in America. In 1912, Frost, along with his family, moved to England. Frost also took his poems with him that he had written in America but did not publish it. Indeed the publishers of England proved receptive to an innovative verse of Robert Frost. Frost n with his own efforts and help of Ezra pound published his book A Boy’s Will in 1913. His poems “The Tuft of Flowers,” “Mowing,” and “Storm Fear” from the first book were the standard pieces.

In 1914, he published his second collection North of Boston. The collection contained the major and most popular poems of Robert Frost. These poems include “The Death of the Hired Man,” “After Apple-Picking,” “Mending Wall,” and “Home Burial.” In 1914, Anne Lowell, the Boston poet, traveled to England and encountered Frost’s work in the bookstore. She took the books with her to America and launched a campaign to publish it in America. In the meantime, she also started writing a complimentary review of North of Boston.

Frost had achieved great fame without his knowledge. In 1915, Frost returned to America because of World War I. Till that time, the review of Amy Lowell was already published, and everyone was aware of the unusual qualities of Robert Frost. His book North of Boston had been published by Henry Holt Publishers in 1914. It was the best-seller, and when Frost was moving to America, it had already started publishing the American edition of A Boy’s Will. Frost was instantly approached by various magazines to publish his poems.

In 1915, at Franconia, New Hampshire, Frost bought a little farm. However, he was unable to support his family with the income of poetry and farm.  Thus, he started lecturing part-time at Amherst College. From 1916 to 1938, he taught at the University of Michigan. In 1916, he published a new collection of poems, Mountain Interval. The collection continued to be as successful and the previous one. In 1923, he published New Hampshire. This collection received a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. 

His further collection was published in the succeeding years. He published Collected Poem in 1930, Further Range in 1936, and A Witness Tree in 1942. He also published volumes of poetry that includes West-Running Brook in 1928, In Clearing in 1962, and Steeple Blush in 1947. From 1939 to 1943, he served as the Poet-in-residence at Harvard; from 1943 to 1949 at Dartmouth; and from 1949 to 63 at Amherst College. He gathered awards and honors from every year in his last years. He also served as the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress from 1958 to 1959.

In 1962, on a goodwill tour, Frost visited the Soviet Union. However, he, by mistake, altered the statement by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev after the meeting. The good intended by the visit was unwittingly undone.

On 29 th January 1963, frost faced complications from his prostate surgery and died. He left two daughters, Irma and Lesley. His remains are buried in Bennington, Vermont, in a family plot. 

Robert Frost’s Literary Style

A regional poet.

Robert Frost was living in the region of New England, almost in New Hampshire. He considered it to be one of the two best states in the United States of America; the other was Vermont. He was a poet in his region. He did not include the region of all of America in his poetic scope. However, he also did not attempt to bring regional unity to his characters and also create a Utopian world for them. According to John Lynen, “Frost is the best known to the public as the poet of New England. Like Faulkner, he stands forth as both the interpreter and the representative of his regional culture.”

The setting of New England offered him stories, characters, attitudes that he needed. He loved the tradition of New England and sought strength from it. His works fall in the pastoral literary tradition. His characters, subjects, and events belong to rural New England. He focuses on the ordinary setting and events of rural areas.

Symbolism in Robert Frost’s Poetry

Symbolism is an indirect and veiled mode of communication. Along with the surface meaning, a literary piece also has a deeper meaning, which can only be understood when one reads the poem/literary work through close examination. The poems of Robert Frost have symbolic meaning.

For example, the poem “Mending Wall” apparently suggests that good neighbors are made by good friends. However, the poem symbolically deals with one of the significant problems. It put forwards the question of whether to make the natural boundaries strong to protect ourselves or to remove them as they limit our interaction with other people.

Similarly, the poem “Stopping by Woods” symbolically suggests the struggle of every individual between their social duties towards others with the stresses of our practical life and the moving longing to escape into nature and relax. Moreover, darks woods in the poem that is covered with the snow, and the speaker is greatly attracted to it, symbolizes death. However, the speaker turns down the call of nature (wood) and decides on fulfilling his social obligations. The speaker says:

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep

  But I have promises to keep,

  And miles to go before I sleep,

  And miles to go before I sleep.”

The poem “Stopping by Woods on a snowy evening” has a new sort of symbolism, unlike the outdated traditional pastoral symbolism. The subtly and indirect nature of Frost’s symbolism in the poem is due to its fondness for inference than obvious statements.  It is due to this subtle quality that readers admire Frost’s poetry. Another unique quality in the reading of the poems of Frost is that our surface understanding of the poem does not coincide with deeper meaning. 

 Though the poems or subject matters, Frost’s poetry is complicated. However, clarity in verse veiled the complications and made the poem comprehensible. Even if the poems had nothing but surface meaning, Frost would be admired for his clarity of verse.

Seriousness and Spontaneity in Frost’s Poetry

The whole life of Robert Frost was dedicated to his poetry, which shows his seriousness for his art. But in the initial life, he did not pay much attention to his poetic talent or analyze the source of his poetic gift. This turned the poetry of Frost having unforced, simple, and lyric charm. It appears to be written effortlessly and naturally, just as breathing.

The verse of Robert Frost d stately, formed, and easily anticipated. The technique he employed is simple. He carefully handles the language and rhythm that his most sophisticated poems have spontaneity. Therefore, his ideas seem to be suddenly discovered, not conceived earlier.

Isolation and Loneliness in Robert Frost’s Poetry

One of the important themes of the poetry of Robert Brown is the isolation of man in the universe and his feeling of alienation from nature. The Majority of his poems deal with the feeling of loneliness and sense of isolation. These themes are also influenced by Frost’s personal experiences. Frost’s sister Jeanie has been mentally ill for a long period due to which she became completely alienated from the world. Jeanie was not able to cope with the stiffness and cruelty of existence. For her, the reality of love, birth, and death was conflicting. The ideal world of Jeanie never reconciled with her real world.

In the poem “Home Burial,” the plight of the husband is similar to the plight of Frost in being powerless to deter her sister from the view of the world. The woman in the poem is unable to accept the reality of the situation, just like Jeanie. The woman is unable to reconcile herself to the death of her child and becomes totally alienated from the world.

Similarly, in the poem “An Old Man’s Winter Night” is about an old man roaming alone in the empty house on a winter night and then goes to the store and sleep beside it. The poem efficiently portrays the loneliness of old age and shows deep hostility of life counter to death.

“One Aged Man—-One Man—Can’t Keep A House,

  A Farm, A Countryside, Or If He Can,

  It’s Thus He Does It Of A Winter Night.”

The Portrayal of Characters and Psychoanalysis

Frost’s poems also depict the characters with a psychoanalytical approach. The psychoanalytical approach shows the features of modernism in Frost’s poetry. In these poems, Frost explores the unconscious mind of his characters, although Frost does not seem to be directly influenced by Sigmund Freud. His poetry also focuses on abnormal psychology, dealing with morbid and unconventional behavior of humans. In these poems, the characters are lonely and neurotic. For example, in the poem Home Burial , there is an over-wrought mother who is outrageous in the grief of the death of her child.

Similarly, in “The Death of Hired Man,” the decaying Silas is adhering through carelessness and failure to his need for self-respect. The characters of Robert Frost are full of blood and flesh; he enters into their mind with intense awareness and brings into reality their movements, actions, and speeches with psychoanalytical power.

Narrative and Dramatic Quality of Frost’s poetry

Robert Frost’s poetry is essentially dramatic, no matter what the theme is. He dramatizes his poetry for his readers by creating full scenes of situations and a realistic atmosphere. The dramatic quality is at the peak in the poem at denouement when the fact of the world in the poem attains its metaphysical significance.

For example, in the poem “Home Burial” and “The Death of Hired Man” characters, scenes, and dialogues are shown with full narrative skills like a stage drama.

Fancy and Fact in Frost’s Poetry

The poetry of Robert Frost is beautifully blended of fancy and fact. He inculcates everything in his observation. In the poem “Stopping by Woods,” Frost blends the fancy and facts through the feeling of enjoying the scene of beautiful wood and trying to escape from reality. The speaker is captivated in a lovely scene, but at the same time, he realizes his social obligations of the real and practical life.

Conversational and colloquial Style of Robert Frost

Robert Frost mastered the colloquial and conversational style. He uses sober, quire, and bewitching sort of words. His dialogues are homely, such as in Poem “Home Burial” and “Death of The Hired Man.” His poetry has actual speech rhythm and employed it with mastery. One of his distinguishing features includes the movement of blank verse. The diction he uses is also simple and colloquial. Just like Wordsworth, he employed the language really used by the common man.

Poet of Nature

One of the dominant subjects of Frost’s poetry is Nature; however, he is not nature-poet like that of Thomas Hardy and Wordsworth. His poetry focuses on a man in nature, whereas the poetry of Wordsworth deals with the prospect of the natural world. He perceives no infusing essence in the natural objective and hardhearted. For Frost, nature provides comfort as well as a threat. 

Philosophy, Moral Didacticism, and Aphorism

The wisdom that develops by tolerance, understanding, and observation is preferred by Frost. He is a philosophical poet, and his philosophical value lies in the incentive of intelligence which assists human actions in everyday life. The main characteristics of Frost’s poetry are: it is philosophical, didactic, and aphoristic. The aphoristic verses in the poem provide philosophical and didactic quality. The Following are the examples of his aphoristic lines from different poems.

“A Home is a place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in” from the poem “Death of Hired Man.”

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” From the poem “Mending Wall.”

“Earth’s right place for love

I do not know where it’s likely to go better ” From the poem “Birches.”

“But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep” from the poem “Stopping by Wood.”

Though the poems of Frost have a moral purpose, however, the moral lesson is given through either an argument moving the lyric or in a dramatic situation. The moral lesson is not explicit and obvious. Similarly, he deals with the notions of life, birth, truth, and death to make his poem philosophical.

Lyrical Quality

In his poetry, Frost employs the oldest way to make a new and distinctive lyrical form of poetry. Musicality is an essential feature of a lyrical poem, and musicality in the verses is achieved by rhyme, meter, and traditional patterns of stanzas. Frost’s main reputation is based on the lyrical quality of his poetry. For example, in the poem “Stopping by Wood” and “The Road Not Taken” is full of lyricism. In his poetry, Frost not only renews the subject of lyricism in poetry but also brought originality and astonishing sophistication to it. Frost focuses much on the tune and sound of his poem.

Fusion or Integration in Frost’s Poetry

In Frost’s poetry, heterogeneous ideas and elements are fused together in a single independent unit. The main problem is to achieve fusion and integration. Once the integration is achieved, wonder, mystery, and magic are observed in the poetry. According to Frost, a variety of poetry lies not in its uniqueness of form but in the uniqueness of its subject matter. The two ideas fused together in a poem may be difficult to separate from each other. In Frost, poetry, two different subjects are happily united, not forcefully.

Metaphysical Elements in Frost’s Poetry

Just Emerson and Emily Dickenson, Frost is also a metaphysical poet. His metaphysical quality permits him to see beyond the ordinary. Throughout the poems of Frost, like other great metaphysical poems, there is an increased tension created between the simple feet and the mystery revolving around it. The conflict is resolved at the end of the poem with a moral lesson. 

The Irony in Robert Frost’s Poetry

In “Two Ways of Looking at Robert Frost, Randel Jarrell writes: “At its best, Frost’s irony is the sharpest of poetic weapons; at its worst, it is the forgivable pun of a wise old duffer.”

There are two personalities of Robert Frost. The one that everyone knows and the one nobody really knows it or talks about it. The personality of Frost that everyone knows is the one who writes poetry with good puns, and these puns are easily understood by the common readers. For academic writers, the easy side is very attractive, and it is this side that the other personality of the poet is neglected. Similarly, the poetry of Frost has two sides: simple and ironic. The irony is hardly understood by anyone. 

Works Of Robert Frost

• The Road Not Taken
• Mending Wall

Author : Robert Frost

Works [ edit ]

• Twilight (self-published in 1894)
• A Boy's Will (1934)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2030 due to Renewal R291387
• Selected Poems (1923) ( transcription project )
• " Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening " (1922)
• Selected Poems (1928)
• Collected Poems (1930)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2026 due to Renewal R201246
• The Lone Striker (1933)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2029 due to Renewal R277197
• Selected Poems (3rd ed., 1934)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2030 due to Renewal R295598
• Two Tramps in Mud Time (1934)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2030 due to Renewal R295602
• Taken Doubly
• The Outlands
• "The Hardship of Accounting"
• A Further Range. Book 6 (1936)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2032 due to Renewal R317269
• From Snow to Snow (1936)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2032 due to Renewal R316174
• To a Young Wretch (1937)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2033 due to Renewal R360262
• Poetry of Poverty (1938)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2034 due to Renewal R379082
• The Poet's Next of Kin in a College (1938)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2034 due to Renewal R379083
• Collected Poems (contains additions, 1939)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2035 due to Renewal R382263
• Our Hold on the Planet (1940)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2036 due to Renewal R440467
• I Could Give All To Time (Christmas card, 1941)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2037 due to Renewal R463471
• "The Silken Tent"
• Come in and Other Poems (1943)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2039 due to Renewal R495194
• A Masque of Reason (1945)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2041 due to Renewal R530570
• A Masque of Mercy (1947)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2043 due to Renewal R593665
• Steeple Bush (1947)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2043 due to Renewal R593664
• Closed for Good (1948)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2044 due to Renewal R626713
• Complete Poems of Robert Frost (Limited & regular eds., 1949)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2045 due to Renewal R655006
• Doom to Bloom (1950)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2046 due to Renewal RE001159
• A Cabin in the Clearing (1951)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2047 due to Renewal RE023320
• Does No One But Me at All Ever Feel This Way in the Least? (1952)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2048 due to Renewal RE052157
• One More Brevity. (1953)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2049 due to Renewal RE084081
• Aforesaid (Introd. & The Prerequisites, 1954)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2050 due to Renewal RE123068
• From A Milkweed Pod (1954)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2050 due to Renewal RE123069
• Some Science Fiction. (1955)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2051 due to Renewal RE163047
• Kitty Hawk, 1894 (1956)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2052 due to Renewal RE206710
• Away (1958)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2054 due to Renewal RE308479
• A Wishing Well (1959)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2055 due to Renewal RE343795
• You Come Too: Favorite Poems for Young Readers (Compilation of prev. pub. poems with foreword written and wood engravings created for this ed., 1959)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2055 due to Renewal RE343631
• Accidentally on Purpose (1960)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2056 due to Renewal RE381652
• Auspex. (1960)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2056 due to Renewal RE381917 (original poem by Robert Frost published for the first time with his permission in "Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence" by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.)
• In the Clearing (new poems on p. 27–30, 35, 37–39 ... [et al.], 1962)—Copyrighted in the United States until 2058 due to Renewal RE479901

Works about Frost [ edit ]

• " Frost, Robert ," in Collier's New Encyclopedia , New York: P. F. Collier & Son Co. (1921)
• " Frost, Robert ," in Encyclopædia Britannica (12th ed., 1922)

Some or all works by this author are in the public domain in the United States because they were published before January 1, 1929.

This author died in 1963, so works by this author are in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 60 years or less . These works may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works .

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A celebration of friendship, Robert Frost and American poetry

The Frederick and Joan Christopherson Schmidt Robert Frost Celebration of American Poetry was held in Flesch Family Welcome Center on Thursday, April 11. This is an annual event in its eleventh year at UW-Eau Claire. 

The event centers around a collection donated to the McIntyre Library Special Collections and Archives that contains everything from books to holiday cards and letters that are all correlated in one particular way: through Robert Frost. Particularly, through a friendship a former Wisconsin resident had with Frost himself.

The collection was donated to the university by Joan Christopherson Smith, known by most as “Miss Chris,” a name she got after her two stints on Wisconsin Public Television with children’s shows “Let’s Talk It Over with Miss Chris” and “Fairy Tales from Around the World” in the 1950s and ‘60s. She later taught in schools for the majority of her remaining career.

Miss Chris met her husband, Frederick “Fritz” Schmidt, in Milwaukee teaching art to children. Schmidt was a close friend of renowned American poet Robert Frost . The pair met at Dartmouth College in the 1940s, Schmidt a student and avid collector of Frost’s work and Frost a Tickner Fellow working at the university. Frost taught between 1943 and 1949.

“Fritz was a very shy seventeen-year old at Dartmouth,” Miss Chris said. “One day the librarian said, ‘Hey Fritz, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.’ It was Robert Frost.”

Greg Kocken, head of Special Collections and Archives, said the collection stems from the long friendship between Frost and Schmidt.

“The two became quick acquaintances,” Kocken said. “From the stories I’ve heard, the two would start to traverse campus together ang go on long walks and be able to talk about all of these things they had in common.”

Schmidt was called up for service during World War II, but his friendship with Frost did not cease.

“Robert Frost wrote to Fritz’s parents and said, ‘Would you send me his books?’” Kocken said. “During the course of the war, Robert Frost would occasionally open up one of Fritz’s books, write some poetry inside the front cover, sign it and after the war had concluded he sent the whole lot.”

About 20 books were inscribed by Frost, most of which were then donated to the university.

After his passing in 2005, Miss Chris was encouraged to donate her late husband’s rare collection of Robert Frost by Eau Claire resident Dr. Mark H. Attermeier, next-door neighbor of Miss Chris’ sister, to ensure that they would do more than collect dust. Taking his advice, Miss Chris decided on UW-Eau Claire as the right place to donate the collection to.

One condition of her donation was that Miss Chris requested that the collection, as well as American poetry itself, be celebrated every year. At 93, she still drives herself from Milwaukee to Eau Claire to attend.

“Every year we have a celebration of American poetry,” Kocken said.

Michele Olson, director of Stewardship and Planned Giving, helps to coordinate this event when it is time to be held.

“I’m mostly the coordinator of the logistical things, planning the event,” Olson said. “We work together planning the event, planning the logistics, data and time, readers. That sort of thing.”

Olson said that, in being a liberal arts university, this event is just one way that students can learn something new.

“Learning doesn’t just happen through a book, through a computer, through math. There’s other ways of learning that the liberal arts education opportunity encompasses,” Olson said.

The event was introduced and brought to a close by Max Garland , former UW-Eau Claire English professor and Poet Laureate of Wisconsin in 2013 and 2014.

Garland is also a friend of Miss Chris. As a testament to their friendship, Garland greeted Miss Chris with the only living daffodil from his garden, or as he liked to say, he brought her his “entire garden.”

Garland and others made their way to the front podium to read select poems, some by Robert Frost, some by other renowned poets and even some original. 

After all had finished their readings, Miss Chris shared her knowledge of the friendship between her late husband Fritz and Frost.

“They both loved nature, they both were a little shy and they both wanted a better world,” Miss Chris said. “They both wanted to make it.”

Miss Chris then read Frost’s “Stopped by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.” She shared her hopes for the future, even ones she may not live to see.

“I truly wish I were young again. I have so much to do,” Miss Chris said. “Maybe this will be the last time [I attend], you never know.”

An avid believer in environmental preservation herself, Miss Chris left the group with one piece of advice.

“We have work to do,” Miss Chris said.

Braun can be reached at [email protected] .

• mcintyre library
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