Frost, Robert Lee

(1875-1963)

   Perhaps the greatest American poet of the 20th century, Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California, but brought up in New Hampshire after his father’s early death. He was educated in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and went to Dartmouth College in 1892. He did not complete his university education but for a while divided his time between farming, teaching, and writing poetry. In 1912, he sold his farm and moved to England, and in 1913 he published his first collection of verse, A Boy’s Will. His second collection, North of Boston, was published in 1914. Having achieved some critical success, Frost and his family returned to the United States in 1915. Mountain Interval was published in 1916, and Frost was appointed to a teaching post at Amherst. He left his post in 1920, established a summer study program at Middlebury College, and was “poet in residence” at Ann Arbor. In 1923, Selected Poems and New Hampshire appeared. New Hampshire won the first of four Pulitzer Prizes that Frost was awarded. For the rest of his career, he divided his time between teaching appointments at different colleges.

   Frost produced several more volumes of poetry. His Collected Poems (1930), A Further Range (1936), and The Witness Tree (1942) were awarded Pulitzer Prizes, but the 1930s were marked by personal tragedy with the deaths of his daughter and wife and suicide of his son. Although not particularly politically engaged, Frost was fairly critical of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. After World War II, he wrote two plays in blank verse, A Masque of Reason (1945) and A Masque of Mercy (1947). Comparatively, he wrote very little after 1948. His last collection of poems, In the Clearing (1962), was well received. He was appointed as consultant on poetry at the Library of Congress from 1958 to 1959, and in 1961 he read one of his poems, “The Gift Outright,” at President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural and was awarded the Congressional Medal. Frost is remembered for his variations on blank verse and use of rural images and references to New England in a language easily accessible to the layperson.

   See also Literature and theater.