Robert Frost

Introduction

Robert Frost was the most popular American poet of the twentieth century. Most Americans recognize his name, the titles of and lines from his best-known poems, and even his face and the sound of his voice. Given his immense popularity, it is a remarkable testimony to the range and depth of his achievement that he is also considered by critics to be one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, modern American poet.

Early Years

A young Robert Lee Frost

Despite his indelible association with New England, Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco, California, on March 26, 1874, where his father was involved in journalism and politics. His parents were Isabelle Moodie Frost, a Scottish immigrant, and William Prescott Frost, Jr., the rebellious son—note the poet's full name—of a New England Republican family. The two had met and courted while teaching school in Pennsylvania, but their dissimilar temperaments strained their marriage. An alcoholic, William Frost died of tuberculosis in 1885. Before his death, William Frost expressed a desire to be buried in New England, so Isabelle traveled across the country with young Robert and his sister Jeanie, and settled in her husband's native city of Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Mrs. Frost supported her family by teaching school in Salem, New Hampshire, just across the state line; among her pupils were her own two children. Robert attended high school in Lawrence, where his first poems were published in the school Bulletin. In 1892 he was co-valedictorian of his graduating class with Elinor White, to whom he became engaged later in that year. In September of 1892 he entered Dartmouth College, but withdrew in December, before the end of his first semester. Two years later he enrolled in Harvard, but left before the completion of his second year. He never finished college, though over the course of his life he would be the recipient of many honorary degrees from the most prestigious universities in the United States and Britain.

Between 1910-1920

Elinor Miriam White

Frost worked at a variety of jobs in his late teens and early twenties, including mill hand, newspaper reporter, and teacher in his mother's school. In 1894, a poem of his entitled "My Butterfly" was published in a New York journal, The Independent. This seemed to be the start of a successful career as a poet, but he would in fact endure nearly twenty years of isolation and neglect. He married Elinor on December 19, 1895, and Elliott, their first child, was born on September 29, 1896. Elliott's death, from cholera, in July of 1900, was the first of many family tragedies that Frost would endure.

Between 1899 and 1907, Elinor and Robert had five more children—another son, Carol, and four daughters, the last of whom lived for only three days. Frost's mother also died in 1900, of cancer. The following year saw the death of his grandfather, William Prescott Frost, Sr., who left his grandson a yearly annuity of $500.00 (a substantial amount at the time) and the use of his farm in Derry, New Hampshire, for a period of ten years, after which Robert would become its owner.

Frost's children

Frost raking hay, Derry Farm 1908

Literary Career

Despite his popular image as a farmer-poet, those ten years were the only period of Frost's life in which he worked seriously at farming, and in the last five of them he also found it financially necessary to teach school. He sold the farm in 1911 when it became his, and with the proceeds he moved his family to England in August 1912, hoping to find there the literary success that had eluded him in his own country. In England he made a number of friends and for the first time found himself an accepted member of a group of serious poets. With surprising ease, he had two manuscripts accepted by a London publisher, and was able to return to America early in 1915 as the author of two highly regarded books of verse.

A Boy's Will

The first of these, A Boy's Will (1913), a slender selection from nearly two decades of work, is very much a young man's book. Although several poems give hints of what was to come, its subjects and phrasing are for the most part heavily reminiscent of the Romantic poets, especially Keats and Shelley, who had most influenced the young Frost. It was with North of Boston (1914), a much more substantial book in both bulk and accomplishment, and one which many still consider his finest single collection, that Frost came—to use the title of the first poem in his first book—"Into My Own."

There are good and even great poems in each of Frost's nine separate collections, but it is in North of Boston, and in Mountain Interval (1916) and New Hampshire (1923), its two immediate successors, that the essence of his achievement is to be found, in the two modes that he made his own—subtle, concentrated lyric poems of understated but brilliant technical accomplishment, and longer monologues and narratives, usually written in a flexible and highly colloquial blank verse, often dramatizing the hard life of rural New England in the early part of this century.

Mountain Interval

These poems are the work of a mature man, and in both language and themes they stand apart from A Boy's Will, as well as from the popular image of the poet as an intense youth pouring out his or her deepest emotions in a rhapsodic cascade of words. The speaker in Frost's poems is usually careful and often sly, meditating on and distilling the essence of many years of observation and experience. While there are many passages of brilliant description and stunning beauty in his poetry, his rhetoric is measured and precise as he strives, like Wordsworth a century earlier, to catch the rhythms of the language as it is actually used, to catch, in his own phrase, "the sound of sense." On the surface Frost seems a very traditional poet. He felt that the demands and challenges of strict form were necessary to stimulate one's best efforts and to give the poem its necessary dynamic tension (he famously compared writing free verse to playing tennis with the net down), but in his spare and understated way he helped effect a revolution against the overwrought poetic standards of the time; the understatement was itself the very essence of that revolution.

Upon his return to America, Frost's outward life began to take the shape that it would follow thereafter: publication of new and collected volumes at fairly regular intervals; teaching appointments, often sinecures, at Amherst, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Michigan, with his income supplemented by a heavy schedule of lectures and poetry readings all over the country; accumulating fame and honors, including an unprecedented four Pulitzer Prizes.

Last Years and Legacy The capstone of his public career was his appearance at John F. Kennedy's Presidential inauguration in January 1961. Kennedy also sent him to the Soviet Union as a sort of cultural envoy in 1962, not long before Frost's death in a Boston hospital on January 29, 1963, eight weeks short of his eighty-ninth birthday.

Frost (right) receiving the Congressional medal of honor from President Kennedy, 1962

Behind the largely unruffled public facade was a personal life of great stress and sorrow. His daughters Lesley and Irma underwent unhappy marriages and painful divorces; Irma was at one point committed to a mental hospital, as Frost's sister had been some years earlier. His daughter Marjorie, in many ways the favorite of both her parents, died shortly after the birth of her first child in 1934, a loss from which neither Frost nor his wife ever fully recovered. In March 1938, after a long and often difficult marriage, Elinor herself died of heart disease. In October 1940, Frost's son Carol, feeling himself a failure despite Frost's strenuous efforts to convince him otherwise, committed suicide.

None of these traumatic experiences found their way directly into Frost's poetry. At a far remove from the confessional tendencies of many later American poets, he did not see his art as a form of therapy. But these experiences, and the sense of helplessness and self-recrimination that many of them bred, inevitably worked to shape and color the views of life's possibilities and its limits that inform his work. To the broad public, Frost may be a painter of charming postcard scenes and a front-porch philosopher dispensing consolation and cracker-barrel wisdom, but behind these stereotypes there is in Frost's work a tragic and (in Lionel Trilling's phrase) a terrifying poet, whose deepest note is one of inevitable human isolation.

Frost was an expert manipulator of his own public image, and was himself responsible for breeding many of these stereotypes. He was so successful at establishing this image of himself and his poetry that, after his death, the publication of the three volumes of his official biography occasioned a scandal and a backlash. Over hundreds of pages, the biographer relentlessly and one-sidedly documents every instance of pettiness, jealousy, and mean-spiritedness in a very long life, presenting Frost as an emotional cannibal who at every turn sacrificed his loved ones to his artistic ambitions. Like everyone, Frost was a flawed human being, but he was hardly the monster shown here; others have given ample testimony to his generosity and love as a friend, a parent, and a husband. In a life more painful than most, Frost struggled heroically with his inner and outer demons, and out of that struggle he produced what many consider to be the single greatest body of work by any American poet of the twentieth century.

Additional Resources: The online Bibliography includes an extended list of writings about Robert Frost. Continue your Web Explorations by visiting Frost Links.