Introducing Robert Frost

Robert Frost
(1874-1963)

Robert Frost is one of my top favorite poets.  For a long time he was my absolute favorite, though now he has to kind of share that with a couple others (Langston Hughes and Kenneth Koch, if you are curious).  He was the only poet I studied while in high school that I actually liked while in high school, and I won't deny that part of that was because of the book The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, in which one of his poems gets quoted and is a big part of the book's theme.  But I also liked how accessible his poems were, and how many of them were about rural life.  I lived out in the country until I went to college, and loved being outside, and his poems resonated a lot with me because of that.

Robert Frost and his poetry are often considered synonymous with New England life, but he was actually born in San Francisco, California!  However, his forebears were among the earliest settlers of Massachusetts and New Hampshire.  When Robert Frost was 11, his father died, and his mother had to borrow money to move the family back to Massachusetts to live with her family.  He grew up there with his sister, and published his first poem in his high school's magazine, as well as being voted Class Poet.  Robert and his future wife, Elinor White, were co-valedictorians for their high school class.

Robert attended college for just a couple of months, then left to get a job and work on his poetry.  He held a variety of jobs over the next few years, like working in a factory, delivering newspapers, and teaching school.  He first sold a poem in 1894, for $15 (almost $600 today), and was so excited about earning money with his poetry that he proposed to his girlfriend Elinor.  She turned him down because she was attending college and wanted to finish her degree before getting married.  Once she graduated, they were married in 1895.  Robert attended Harvard University for two years, but left when they learned Elinor was expecting their second child.  They had six children together, but only two outlived Robert and Elinor.

Robert's grandfather bought a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, for Robert and his young family, and the Frosts settled down there.  Robert worked the farm and wrote poetry, but he couldn't make the farm pay enough to support them, so he took a series of teaching jobs at different New Hampshire schools.  In 1912, the Frosts moved to Great Britain, and Robert made friends with some important poets there, including Ezra Pound.  He published two collections of poetry there, then returned to New Hampshire when World War One started.  He bought a different farm there and really set about his life's work of writing and publishing poetry, teaching English at various colleges, and going on lecture tours.  That farm is now a museum and poetry center.

Over the course of his career, Robert Frost won four Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry, more than any other American poet has ever been awarded.  He was named the United States Poet Laureate in 1958, and read some of his own poetry at President John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961.  He died at the age of 88 in Boston, having outlived his wife and four of their children.  His life held a lot of sadness and loss, but he never lost his appreciation for the beauty in the world around him.  You will notice a lot of both those aspects of his life in his poetry.