write a brief biography of robert frost

Robert Frost

(1874-1963)

Who Was Robert Frost?

Robert Frost was an American poet and winner of four Pulitzer Prizes. Famous works include “Fire and Ice,” “Mending Wall,” “Birches,” “Out Out,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay” and “Home Burial.” His 1916 poem, "The Road Not Taken," is often read at graduation ceremonies across the United States. As a special guest at President John F. Kennedy ’s inauguration, Frost became a poetic force and the unofficial "poet laureate" of the United States.

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

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• Last Updated: December 1, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
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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 poets 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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• B.A., English and American Literature, University of California at Santa Barbara
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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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Life and Works of Robert Frost

The Risk of Spirit: An Artist's Life

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Works by Frost

Books of poetry.

Frost in His Own Words

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• World Biography

Robert Frost Biography

Born: March 26, 1874 San Francisco, California Died: January 29, 1963 Boston, Massachusetts American poet

Robert Frost was a traditional American poet in an age of experimental art. He used New England expressions, characters, and settings, recalling the roots of American culture, to get at the common experience of all.

The early years

Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco, California, on March 26, 1874. His father, William, came from Maine and New Hampshire ancestry and had graduated from Harvard in 1872. He left New England and went to Lewistown, Pennsylvania, to teach. He married another teacher, Isabelle Moodie, a Scotswoman, and they moved to San Francisco, where the elder Frost became an editor and politician. Robert, their first child, was named for the Southern hero General Robert E. Lee (1807–1870).

When Frost's father died in 1884, his will requested that he be buried in New England. His wife and two children, Robert and Jeanie, went east for the funeral. Lacking funds to return to California, they settled in Salem, Massachusetts, where his grandfather had offered them a home. Eventually Mrs. Frost found a job teaching at a school.

Transplanted New Englander

As a young boy, Robert loved his mother reading to him. Her influence introduced him to a large variety of literature, and from this he was inspired to become an excellent reader. He lacked enthusiasm for school in his elementary years, but became a serious student and graduated from Lawrence High School as valedictorian (top in his class) and class poet in 1892. He enrolled at Dartmouth College but soon left. He had become engaged to Elinor White, classmate and fellow valedictorian, who was completing her college education. Frost moved from job to job, working in mills, at newspaper reporting, and at teaching, all the while writing poetry. In 1894 he sold his first poem, "My Butterfly," to the New York Independent. Overjoyed, he had two copies of a booklet of lyrics privately printed, one for his fiancée and one for himself. He delivered Elinor's copy in person but did not find her response to be enthusiastic. Thinking he had lost her, he tore up his copy and wandered south as far as the Dismal Swamp (from Virginia to North Carolina), even contemplating killing himself.

In 1895, however, Frost married Elinor and tried to make a career of teaching. He helped his mother run a small private school in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where his first son was born. He spent two years at Harvard, but undergraduate study proved difficult while raising a family. With a newborn daughter as well as a son to now raise, he decided to try chicken farming at Methuen, Massachusetts, on a farm purchased by his grandfather. In 1900, when his nervousness was diagnosed as a sign that he may possibly contract tuberculosis (a disease caused by bacteria that usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other organs in the body), he moved his poultry business to Derry, New Hampshire. There his first son soon died. In 1906 Frost was stricken with pneumonia (a disease that causes inflammation of the lungs) and almost died. A year later his fourth daughter died. This grief and suffering, as well as lesser frustrations in his personal and business life, turned Frost more and more to poetry. Once again he tried teaching, in Derry and then in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

Creation of the poet

In 1912, almost forty and with only a few poems published, Frost sold his farm and used an allowance from his grandfather to go to England and gamble everything on poetry. The family settled on a farm in Buckinghamshire, and Frost began to write. Ezra Pound (1885–1972), another American poet, helped him get published in magazines, and he met many people in literature that helped to inspire and further expand his knowledge of poetry.

Frost published A Boy's Will (1913), and it was well received. Though it contains some nineteenth-century expressions, the words and rhythms are generally informal and subtly simple.

North of Boston (1914) is more objective, made up mainly of blank verse (poetry without rhyme) monologues (long speeches, plays, or entertainment given by a single person) and dramatic narratives (stories or descriptions of events). North of Boston added to the success of A Boy's Will, and the two volumes announced the two modes of Frost's best poetry, the lyric (a poem telling of love or other emotions) and the narrative. Although immediately established as a nature poet, he did not glorify nature. He addressed not only its loveliness but also the isolation, harshness, and pain its New England inhabitants had to endure.

A public figure

When the Frosts returned to the United States in 1915, North of Boston was a bestseller. Sudden fame embarrassed Frost, who had always avoided crowds. He withdrew to a small farm in Franconia, New Hampshire, but financial need soon saw him responding to demands for readings and lectures. In 1915 and 1916 he was a Phi Beta Kappa (an organization made up of college students and graduates who have achieved a high level of academic excellence in studies of liberal arts and sciences) poet at Tufts College and at Harvard University. He conquered his shyness, developing a brief and simple speaking manner that made him one of the most popular performers in America and abroad.

In 1916 Frost published Mountain Interval, which brought together lyrics and narratives in his poetry. In 1917 Frost became one of the first poets-in-residence on an American campus. He taught at Amherst from 1917 to 1920, in 1918 receiving a master of arts, the first of many academic honors. The following year he moved his farm base to South Saftsbury, Vermont. In 1920 he cofounded the Bread Loaf School of English of Middlebury College, serving there each summer as lecturer and consultant. From 1921 to 1923 he was poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan.

Frost's Selected Poems and a new volume, New Hampshire, appeared in 1923. Frost received the first of four Pulitzer Prizes for the latter in 1924. Though the title poem does not present Frost at his best, the volume also contains such lyrics as "Fire and Ice," "Nothing Gold Can Stay," and "To Earthward."

Frost returned to Amherst for two years in 1923 and to the University of Michigan in 1925 and then settled at Amherst in 1926. In 1928 Frost published West Running Brook, in which he continued his use of tonal variations (changes in sound and rhythm) and a mixture of lyrics and narratives.

Frost visited England and Paris in 1928 and published his Collected Poems in 1930. In 1934 he suffered another painful loss with the death of his daughter Marjorie. He returned to Harvard in 1936 and in the same year published A Further Range.

Later work and personal tragedies

Because of Frost's weak lungs, his doctor ordered him south in 1936, and thereafter he spent his winters in Florida. Frost served on the Harvard staff from 1936 to 1937 and received an honorary doctorate. After his wife died of a heart attack in 1938, Frost resigned from the Amherst staff and sold his house. That same year he was elected to the Board of Overseers of Harvard College. In 1939 his second Collected Poems appeared, and he began a three-year stay at Harvard. In 1940 his only surviving son took his own life.

In 1945 Frost composed something new in A Masque of Reason, an updated version of the biblical story of Job. A Masque of Mercy (1947), was a companion verse drama (a dramatic poem) based on the biblical story of the prophet Jonah.

Frost's Complete Poems appeared in 1949, and in 1950 the U.S. Senate honored him on his seventy-fifth birthday. In 1957 he returned to England to receive doctoral degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. On his eighty-fifth birthday the Senate again honored him. In 1961, at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy (1917–1963), Frost recited "The Gift Outright," the first time a poet had honored a presidential inauguration. A final volume, In the Clearing, appeared in 1962.

On January 29, 1963, Frost died in Boston, Massachusetts, of complications following an operation. He was buried in the family plot in Old Bennington, Vermont.

For More Information

Brodsky, Joseph, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott. Homage to Robert Frost. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Robert Frost: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. New York: Henry Holt, 1999.

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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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Poetry & Poets

Explore the beauty of poetry – discover the poet within

A Short Biography Of Robert Frost

Robert Frost is one of the most renowned and celebrated poets of the 20th century. Born in San Francisco in 1874, he was raised in a working-class family and started writing poetry while attending both high school and college in Massachusetts. He served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1958 to 1963, and is a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Frost’s works explore themes of nature, rural life and human relationships; they often use traditional forms such as sonnets and villanelles, as well as free-verse compositions.

The power of Frost’s verse lies in his use of colloquial language which speaks to the everyday experience of his readers. He was also highly influenced by New England writers including Edward Taylor, Emily Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and incorporated many of their ideas and techniques into his own work. Frost’s classic works include ‘The Road Not Taken’, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ and ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’.

Frost was an acclaimed poet in his lifetime and was described by friends and critics alike as a genius and an American master. In addition to his Pulitzer Prizes, he was awarded numerous honorary degrees and fellowships, and was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960. Frost’s life and work have been widely celebrated and have helped to define American poetry.

Frost continued publishing poems and books of poetry until his death in 1963. After being affected by health problems in the last five years of his life, he passed away in Boston at the age of 88. Robert Frost’s poetic legacy is significant, and he is remembered today as one of the most important American poets to ever live.

Early Life and Education

Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874 in San Francisco, to Isabelle and William Prescott Frost, Jr. His father died when Frost was 11, and he was raised by his mother and stepfather who was a teacher.

At the age of 15, Frost started attending high school in Lawrence, Massachusetts. During his high school years, he published poems in the Lawrence High School newspaper. After graduating high school in 1892, he attended Dartmouth College for two months and later, Harvard for one semester.

In 1895, Frost returned to Lawrence and focused on writing poetry. He married Elinor Miriam White in 1895 and they had six children together. In 1897, Frost left Lawrence to teach at the New Hampshire State Normal School in Plymouth, New Hampshire where he experimented with his poetry and developed his own poetic style.

Frost was highly influenced by the writings of Emerson, Whitman and Edward Taylor. In 1912, he began submitting his poetry and soon after, several of his poems were published in nationally-renowned magazines.

Career and Major Works

In 1913, Frost and his family moved to England in search of a better literary atmosphere. While in England, he wrote and published his first book of poems, ‘A Boy’s Will’. This book was highly acclaimed in Britain but did not gain recognition in the U.S. until 1915. Later poetry books such as ‘North of Boston’ (1914) and ‘Mountain Interval’ (1916) shocked readers with their unconventional use of language and themes.

In 1920, Frost returned to the U.S., and soon after he began winning recognition, awards, lectureships and honorary degrees. Over the next few decades, he wrote and published numerous books of poetry, and also established himself as a literary lecturer. In 1938, he presented a lecture at the Library of Congress that received national attention.

In 1936, he was teaching at Amherst College, and soon after, he began teaching at Harvard and University of Michigan. During this period, he wrote ‘A Witness Tree’ (1942) and ‘Steeple Bush’ (1947). His poems from this period reflect his newfound faith in human kindness and optimism. Frost’s last book of poems, ‘In the Clearing’, was published in 1962.

Awards and Achievements

Frost has won numerous awards and honorary titles throughout his stellar career. He was awarded four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry between 1924 and 1943, and four Special Citations from the Pulitzer Prize Board between 1944 and 1954. The U.S. government also awarded him with a Grant in Aid of Arts, Letters and Humanities in 1954. In 1958, he became the Poet Laureate of the United States and was also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 1960, Frost was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. He is the only person to receive this honor without first serving in a political or military capacity. Several colleges, universities and public buildings are named for him, including at Amherst College and the University of Michigan.

After his death in 1963, Frost’s legacy has only grown stronger. His poems are now required reading in many schools, and he continues to be one of the most studied and influential poets of all time. His work is part of the literary canon of the U.S. and beyond, and has been adapted for the stage, television and film.

Frost’s work is known for its accessible language and its subtle exploration of timeless themes. His poems make use of traditional poetic forms while speaking to the everyday experience of life. He had a deep appreciation for nature and the interconnectedness of life, and these ideas are omnipresent in his poetry. Robert Frost remains a symbol of poetic excellence and a source of inspiration for many writers.

Famous Quotes

Because of his lifelong appreciation of language, Frost left behind many famous quotations. Some of his most well-known quotes include: “The best way out is always through”, “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on”, “A poet never takes notes; you never take notes in a love affair” and “A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age”.

Influence on American Poetry

Frost was a leading figure in American poetry and was hugely influential to poets from many different generations. He had a lifelong love of language and believed that it should be accessible to everyone. His free-verse style of writing resonates with readers and is often cited as a major influence on modern poets. Frost’s work is a symbol of American poetry, and is required reading in many schools.

The widespread appreciation of Frost’s work can be attributed to his accessible language and his profound insights into human relationships. He is considered one of the most important American poets of all time, and his legacy continues to shape American poetry and literature.

Dannah Hannah is an established poet and author who loves to write about the beauty and power of poetry. She has published several collections of her own works, as well as articles and reviews on poets she admires. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English, with a specialization in poetics, from the University of Toronto. Hannah was also a panelist for the 2017 Futurepoem book Poetry + Social Justice, which aimed to bring attention to activism through poetry. She lives in Toronto, Canada, where she continues to write and explore the depths of poetry and its influence on our lives.

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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

Robert Frost

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Robert Frost: Biography, Life & Poetical Works

Life of robert frost, works of robert frost: the evolution of poetic genius.

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Robert Frost Biography

Table of Contents

About Robert Frost , one of the most celebrated American poets of the 20th century, left an indelible mark on the world of literature with his evocative and thought-provoking poetry. In this informative content, we delve into the life, work, and enduring legacy of this remarkable poet, using the provided subheadings as a guide.

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Robert Frost Overview

Robert Frost Biography in English

Robert Frost – Early Life and Background

Robert Lee Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, California. His early life was marked by tragedy as Robert Frost lost his father to tuberculosis when Robert Frost was just 11 years old. This event had a profound impact on his life and would later influence his poetry.

Robert Frost – Education and Family

Frost attended Dartmouth College and later Harvard University, but he never completed a formal degree. Instead, Robert Frost forged his education through reading and personal exploration. He married Elinor White in 1895, and together they had six children.

Robert Frost – Early Writing Career

Frost’s journey as a poet began in earnest when he moved to England in 1912, where he found inspiration and published his first collection, “ A Boy’s Will, ” in 1913. His work received praise for its exploration of rural life and the human condition.

Robert Frost Biography Life

Robert frost – personal life and family.

Frost’s personal life was marked by the complexities of family and relationships. He faced several personal tragedies, including the death of several of his children. These experiences found their way into his poetry, adding depth and emotional resonance to his work.

Robert Frost – Career Challenges and Achievements

Frost faced many challenges in his career, including initial struggles to gain recognition as a poet. However, his perseverance paid off, and he went on to become one of the most celebrated poets in America. His poems, such as “ The Road Not Taken ” and “ Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening ,” are still widely studied and appreciated today.

Robert Frost – Later Years and Legacy

In his later years, Frost continued to write and teach, leaving a lasting impact on the literary world. He received numerous awards, including four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. His legacy endures not only through his poetry but also through the inspiration he provided to countless poets and writers who followed in his footsteps.

Robert Frost Work and Achievements

Robert frost notable poems and literary style.

Frost’s poetry often explores themes of nature, rural life, and the choices we make in life. His style is known for its simplicity, yet beneath the surface lies profound meaning. “The Road Not Taken” is a quintessential example of his work, prompting readers to reflect on life’s decisions.

Themes and Influences in His Poetry

Frost’s poetry delves into themes such as individualism, the passage of time, and the human experience in nature. His close observation of the natural world and its connection to human existence sets his work apart and makes it universally relatable.

Awards and Recognitions

Throughout his career, Frost received numerous accolades, including the Pulitzer Prizes mentioned earlier. Robert Frost poems have been studied, analyzed, and cherished by generations of readers and continue to be a staple in literature courses around the world.

Robert Frost Short Biography

Overview of his life.

In a nutshell, Robert Frost was a prominent American poet born in 1874 in San Francisco, known for his deep and contemplative poetry that often explored themes of nature, choices, and the human experience.

Key Milestones and Events

Some key milestones in Frost’s life include his move to England in 1912, the publication of his first collection, “A Boy’s Will,” and his enduring influence on American poetry.

Impact on American Literature

Frost’s impact on American literature is immeasurable. Robert Frost poems continue to resonate with readers of all ages, offering timeless insights into the human condition.

Robert Frost Images

Robert Frost Poems

Robert frost biography for students.

For young students, Robert Frost’s life story provides an inspirational example of overcoming adversity and finding success through creativity and perseverance. His love for nature, the beauty of his New England surroundings, and his ability to turn everyday observations into profound poetry are excellent points of engagement for students.

Robert Frost’s journey from humble beginnings to literary greatness serves as an inspiring tale of the power of words and determination. Robert Frost poems , with their relatable themes, can encourage students to explore their own creativity and introspection.

In conclusion, Robert Frost’s life and work continue to captivate and inspire readers of all ages. His legacy as a poet and the enduring relevance of his poetry make him a cherished figure in American literature, leaving behind a wealth of wisdom and beauty for generations to come.

Autobiography of Robert Frost

Robert Frost, one of America’s most famous poets, did not write a formal autobiography, but his life story is reflected through his poetry, letters, and various biographical accounts. The autobiography of Robert Frost can be seen in his journey from his birth on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, California, to his rise as a leading figure in American literature. After his father’s death, Frost’s family moved to New England, which deeply influenced his work and became the setting for many of his poems.

Though he attended Dartmouth College and Harvard University, Frost never completed his degree. Instead, he focused on his true passion—poetry. His early years were challenging, with many rejections, but his move to England in 1912 was a turning point. There, he published his first collections, A Boy’s Will and North of Boston , which laid the foundation for the autobiography of Robert Frost as a poet of great renown.

Returning to the United States in 1915, Frost’s work gained popularity, and he became a celebrated poet, winning four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. His poems, such as “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” are essential parts of the autobiography of Robert Frost , revealing his deep reflections on life, nature, and human emotions.

Frost’s personal life, marked by both joy and sorrow, is another significant chapter in the autobiography of Robert Frost . He married Elinor Miriam White, and they had six children, though they faced many personal tragedies, including the loss of several of their children.

Until his death on January 29, 1963, Frost continued to write and teach, leaving behind a legacy that forms the enduring autobiography of Robert Frost . His life and work continue to inspire and resonate, making the autobiography of Robert Frost not just a story of a poet but a reflection of the American experience itself.

Robert Frost Biography Summary

Here is the Robert Frost Biography in info-graphic format it helps students to memories well.

FAQs on Robert Frost Biography

Who is robert frost.

Robert Frost was a highly regarded American poet known for his realistic depictions of rural life in New England. Born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, California, he became one of the most celebrated poets of the 20th century.

What is the best biography of Robert Frost?

There are several biographies of Robert Frost, and the choice of the best one can be subjective. Some notable biographies include Robert Frost: A Biography by Jeffrey Meyers and Robert Frost: The Life of America's Poet by Jay Parini. The best biography for you may depend on your specific interests and what aspects of Frost's life you want to explore.

Why is Robert Frost famous for?

Robert Frost is famous for his mastery of American poetry and his ability to capture the essence of rural New England life in his poems. He received four Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry and is best known for poems like The Road Not Taken and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.

What is the writing style of Robert Frost?

Robert Frost's writing style is characterized by its clarity, simplicity, and use of natural and rural imagery. He often used traditional verse forms, such as blank verse and rhyme, to convey complex ideas and themes in an accessible manner.

What is the main theme of Robert Frost's poetry?

The main themes in Robert Frost's poetry include nature, human choices and decisions, isolation, and the passage of time. Many of Robert Frost poems explore the tensions between individuality and conformity, as well as the complexities of the human experience.

How many poems did Robert Frost write?

Robert Frost wrote numerous poems over the course of his lifetime. He published several collections of poetry, including A Boy's Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval, and many more. In total, he wrote hundreds of poems, which continue to be celebrated and studied in the world of literature.

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