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Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed themes from the early 1900s rural life in New England, using the setting to examine complex social and philosophical themes. A popular and often-quoted poet, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry.
rt Frost was born in San Francisco, California to journalist, William Prescott Frost, Jr.
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Quotations
Don't let him cut my hand off—The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!So. But the hand was gone already.
Out, Out–
All those who try to go it sole alone,Too proud to be beholden for relief,Are absolutely sure to come to grief.
Haec Fabula Docet (1947)
Dont join too many gangs. Join few if any.Join the United States and join the family—But not much in between, unless a college.
Build Soil (1932)
Everything written is as good as it is dramatic. It need not declare itself in form, but it is drama or nothing.
A Way Out, preface (1929)
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on TheeAnd I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.
In the Clearing (1962)
Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.
Title of poem (1942)
Encyclopedia
Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed themes from the early 1900s rural life in New England, using the setting to examine complex social and philosophical themes. A popular and often-quoted poet, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry.
Biography
Early years
Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California to journalist, William Prescott Frost, Jr. and Isabelle Moodie. His mother, was of Scottish descent, and his father, a descendant of colonist Nicholas Frost from Tiverton, Devon, England who had sailed to New Hampshire in 1634 on the Wolfrana.
Frost's father was a teacher and later an editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin (later merged into the San Francisco Examiner), and an unsuccessful candidate for the city tax collector. After his father's death in May 5, 1885, in due time the family moved across-country to Lawrence, Massachusetts under the patronage of (Robert's grandfather) William Frost, Sr., who was an overseer at a New England mill. Frost graduated from Lawrence High School in 1892. Frost's mother joined the Swedenborgian church and had him baptized in it, but he left it as an adult.
Despite his later association with rural life, Frost grew up in the city, and published his first poem in his high school's magazine. He attended Dartmouth College long enough to be accepted into the Theta Delta Chi fraternity. Frost returned home to teach and to work at various jobs including delivering newspapers and factory labor. He did not enjoy these jobs at all, feeling his true calling as a poet.
Adult years
In 1894 he sold his first poem, "My Butterfly: An Elegy" (published in the November 8, 1894 edition of the New York Independent) for fifteen dollars. Proud of this accomplishment he proposed marriage to Elinor Miriam White, but she demurred, wanting to finish college (at St. Lawrence University) before they married. Frost then went on an excursion to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia, and asked Elinor again upon his return. Having graduated she agreed, and they were married at Harvard University, where he attended liberal arts studies for two years.
He did well at Harvard, but left to support his growing family. Grandfather Frost had, shortly before his death, purchased a farm for the young couple in Derry, New Hampshire; and Robert worked the farm for nine years, while writing early in the mornings and producing many of the poems that would later become famous. Ultimately his farming proved unsuccessful and he returned to education as an English teacher, at Pinkerton Academy from 1906 to 1911, then at the New Hampshire Normal School (now Plymouth State University) in Plymouth, New Hampshire.
In 1912 Frost sailed with his family to Great Britain, living first in Glasgow before settling in Beaconsfield outside London. His first book of poetry, A Boy's Will, was published the next year. In England he made some important acquaintances, including Edward Thomas (a member of the group known as the Dymock Poets), T.E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound. Pound would become the first American to write a (favorable) review of Frost's work. Surrounded by his peers, Frost wrote some of his best work while in England.
As World War I began, Frost returned to America in 1915. He bought a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire, where he launched a career of writing, teaching, and lecturing. This family homestead served as the Frosts' summer home until 1938, and is maintained today as 'The Frost Place', a museum and poetry conference site at Franconia. During the years 1916–20, 1923–24, and 1927–1938, Frost taught English at Amherst College, Massachusetts, notably encouraging his students to account for the sounds of the human voice in their writing.
For forty-two years, from 1921 to 1963, Frost spent almost every summer and fall teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English of Middlebury College, at the mountain campus at Ripton, Vermont. He is credited as a major influence upon the development of the school and its writing programs; the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference gained renown during Frost's tenure there. The college now owns and maintains his former Ripton farmstead as a national historic site near the Bread Loaf campus. In 1921 Frost accepted a fellowship teaching post at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he resided until 1927; while there he was awarded a lifetime appointment at the University as a Fellow in Letters. The Robert Frost Ann Arbor home is now situated at The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Frost returned to Amherst in 1927. In 1940 he bought a plot in South Miami, Florida, naming it Pencil Pines; he spent his winters there for the rest of his life.
Harvard's 1965 alumni directory indicates Frost received an honorary degree there. He also received honorary degrees from Bates College and from Oxford and Cambridge universities; and he was the first person to receive two honorary degrees from Dartmouth College. During his lifetime the Robert Frost Middle School in Fairfax, Virginia, and the main library of Amherst College were named after him.
Frost was 86 when he spoke and performed a reading of his poetry at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy on January 20, 1961. Some two years later, on January 29, 1963, he died, in Boston, of complications from prostate surgery. He was buried at the Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont. His epitaph reads, "I had a lover's quarrel with the world."
Frost's poems are critiqued in the "Anthology of Modern American Poetry", Oxford University Press, where it is mentioned that behind a sometimes charmingly familiar and rural façade, Frost's poetry frequently presents pessimistic and menacing undertones which often are not recognized nor analyzed.
Personal life
Robert Frost's personal life was plagued with grief and loss. His father died of tuberculosis in 1885, when Frost was 11, leaving the family with just $8. Frost's mother died of cancer in 1900. In 1920, Frost had to commit his younger sister, Jeanie, to a mental hospital, where she died nine years later. Mental illness apparently ran in Frost's family, as both he and his mother suffered from depression, and his daughter Irma was committed to a mental hospital in 1947. Frost's wife, Elinor, also experienced bouts of depression.
Elinor and Robert Frost had six children: son Elliot (1896–1904, died of cholera), daughter Lesley Frost Ballantine (1899–1983), son Carol (1902–1940, committed suicide), daughter Irma (1903–1967), daughter Marjorie (1905–1934, died as a result of puerperal fever after childbirth), and daughter Elinor Bettina (died three days after birth in 1907). Only Lesley and Irma outlived their father. Frost's wife, who had heart problems throughout her life, developed breast cancer in 1937, and died of heart failure in 1938.
Selected works
Poems
- After Apple-Picking
- Acquainted With the Night
- The Aim Was Song
- An Old Man's Winter Night
- The Armful
- Asking for Roses
- The Bear
- Bereft
- Birches
- The Black Cottage
- Bond And Free
- A Boundless Moment
- A Brook In The City
- But outer Space
- Choose Something Like a Star
- A Cliff Dwelling
- The Code
- Come In
- A Considerable Speck
- The Cow In Apple-Time
- The Death of the Hired Man
-
- The Demiurge's Laugh
- Devotion
- Departmental
- Desert Places
- Design
- Directive
- A Dream Pang
- Dust of Snow
- The Egg and the Machine
- Evening In A Sugar Orchard
- The Exposed Nest
- The Fear
- Fire and Ice (1916)
- Fireflies in the Garden
- The Flower Boat
- Flower-Gathering
- For Once, Then Something
- Fragmentary Blue
- Gathering Leaves
- The Generations of Men
- Ghost House
- The Gift Outright
- A Girl's Garden
- Going For Water
- Good Hours
- Good-bye, and Keep Cold
- The Gum-Gatherer
- A Hundred Collars
- Hannibal
- The Hill Wife
- Home Burial
- Hyla Brook
- In a Disused Graveyard
- In a Poem
- In Hardwood Groves
- In Neglect
- In White (Frost's Early Version of "Design")
- Into My Own
- A Late Walk
- Leaves Compared with Flowers
- The Line-Gang
- A Line-Storm Song
- The Lockless Door
- Love And A Question
- Lure Of The West
- Meeting And Passing
- Mending Wall
- A Minor Bird
- The Mountain
- Mowing
- My Butterfly
- My November Guest
- The Need of Being Versed in Country Things
- Neither Out Far Nor in Deep
- Never Again Would Bird's Song Be the Same
- Not to Keep
- Nothing Gold Can Stay
- Now Close The Windows
- October
- On A Tree Fallen Across The Road
- On Looking Up by Chance at the Constellations
- Once By The Pacific (1916)
- One Step Backward Taken
- Out, Out- (1916)
- The Oven Bird
- Pan With Us
- A Patch of Old Snow
- The Pasture
- Plowmen
- A Prayer in Spring
- Provide, Provide
- Putting in the Seed
- Quandary
- A Question
- Range-Finding
- Reluctance
- Revelation
- The Road Not Taken
- The Road That Lost its Reason
- The Rose Family
- Rose Pogonias
- The Runaway
- The Secret Sits
- The Self-seeker
- A Servant to Servants
- The Silken Tent
- A Soldier
- The Sound of the Trees
- The Span of Life
- Spring Pools
- The Star-Splitter
- Stars
- Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
- Storm Fear
- The Telephone
- They Were Welcome to Their Belief
- A Time to Talk
- To E.T.
- To Earthward
- To the Thawing Wind
- Tree at My Window
- The Trial By Existence
- The Tuft of Flowers
- Two Look at Two
- Two Tramps in Mud Time
- The Vanishing Red
- The Vantage Point
- War Thoughts At Home
- What Fifty Said
- The Wood-Pile
Poetry collections
- Includes poems from first three volumes and the poem The Runaway
- New Hampshire (Holt, 1923; Grant Richards, 1924)
- Several Short Poems (Holt, 1924)
- Selected Poems (Holt, 1928)
- West-Running Brook (Holt, 1928? 1929)
- The Lovely Shall Be Choosers (Random House, 1929)
- Collected Poems of Robert Frost (Holt, 1930; Longmans, Green, 1930)
- The Lone Striker (Knopf, 1933)
- Selected Poems: Third Edition (Holt, 1934)
- Three Poems (Baker Library, Dartmouth College, 1935)
- The Gold Hesperidee (Bibliophile Press, 1935)
- From Snow to Snow (Holt, 1936)
- A Further Range (Holt, 1936; Cape, 1937)
- Collected Poems of Robert Frost (Holt, 1939; Longmans, Green, 1939)
- A Witness Tree (Holt, 1942; Cape, 1943)
- Come In, and Other Poems (1943)
- Steeple Bush (Holt, 1947)
- Complete Poems of Robert Frost, 1949 (Holt, 1949; Cape, 1951)
- Hard Not To Be King (House of Books, 1951)
- Aforesaid (Holt, 1954)
- A Remembrance Collection of New Poems (Holt, 1959)
- You Come Too (Holt, 1959; Bodley Head, 1964)
- In the Clearing (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1962)
- The Poetry of Robert Frost (New York, 1969)
- A Further Range (published as Further Range in 1926, as New Poems by Holt, 1936; Cape, 1937)
- Nothing Gold Can Stay
- What Fifty Said
- Fire And Ice
- A Drumlin Woodchuck
Plays
- A Way Out: A One Act Play (Harbor Press, 1929).
- The Cow's in the Corn: A One Act Irish Play in Rhyme (Slide Mountain Press, 1929).
- A Masque of Reason (Holt, 1945).
- A Masque of Mercy (Holt, 1947).
Prose
- The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963; Cape, 1964).
- Robert Frost and John Bartlett: The Record of a Friendship, by Margaret Bartlett Anderson (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963).
- Selected Letters of Robert Frost (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964).
- Interviews with Robert Frost (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966; Cape, 1967).
- Family Letters of Robert and Elinor Frost (State University of New York Press, 1972).
- Robert Frost and Sidney Cox: Forty Years of Friendship (University Press of New England, 1981).
- The Notebooks of Robert Frost, edited by Robert Faggen (Harvard University Press, January 2007).
Published as
Pulitzer Prizes
- 1924 for New Hampshire: A Poem With Notes and Grace Notes
- 1931 for Collected Poems
- 1937 for A Further Range
- 1943 for A Witness Tree
Sources
- , January 8, 2008 Article: Vandalized Frost house drew a crowd
- Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays. 10/1995 Library of America. Robert Frost. Edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson. Trade ISBN 1-883011-06-X.
External links
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