Robert Frost was an American poet. The date of his born is March 26, 1874, and died on January 29, 1963. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American conversation, wrote often about the settings of rural life in New England and was early 20th century. Using them to examine complex social and philosophical issues.
He was often honored during his lifetime. Frost is the only poet who won 4 of Pulitzer Prizes for poetry. He became one of America’s rare “folk literary figures who are an artistic institution”. Frost received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 and was named Poet Laureate of Vermont in 1961.
Randall Jarrell wrote: “Compared with Stevens and Eliot, Robert Frost seems to me the greatest of American poets of this century. Frost’s qualities are extraordinary.
His wonderful dramatic monologues or dramatic scenes emerge from a knowledge of the people that few poets possess and are composed in a verse that sometimes uses perfect skill and the rhythm of real speech”. In his 1939 essay “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Frost explained his poetics. The writer has no tears, the reader has no tears.
For me, the primary joy is the wonder of feeling something I didn’t know I knew must be a revelation or a series of revelations to the poet to the reader.
For this to happen the material must have the greatest freedom to move within it and to establish relations within it regardless of time and space, prior relations and kinship.”
Life Story of Robert Frost
Robert Frost was born in San Francisco to journalist William Prescott Frost Jr. and Isabel Moody. His father was a descendant of Nicholas Frost of Tiverton, Devon, England, who went to New Hampshire via Wolfrana in 1634, and his mother was a Scottish immigrant.
Frost was also a descendant of Samuel Appleton, one of the early English settlers of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and Reverend George Phillips, one of the early English settlers of Watertown, Massachusetts.
Frost’s father was a teacher and later editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin (which later merged with the San Francisco Examiner) and an unsuccessful candidate for city tax collector.
After his death on May 5, 1885, the family moved across the country to Lawrence, Massachusetts, sponsored by Robert’s grandfather, William Frost Sr., who was an overseer in a New England mill.
Frost returned home to teach and work at various jobs, helping his mother teach the unruly boys in her class, delivering newspapers, and working in a factory maintaining carbon arc lamps. He said he did not enjoy these jobs, feeling that his true calling was writing poetry.
Robert Frost’s Adult Life
Frost then went on a trip to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and asked Elinor again upon his return. After graduation, she agreed and they were married on December 19, 1895, in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
Frost attended Harvard University from 1897 to 1899, but left voluntarily due to ill health.
Shortly before his death, Frost’s grandfather purchased a farm in Derry. New Hampshire for Robert and Eleanor. Frost worked on the farm for nine years while writing in the early hours and creating many of the poems that would later become famous.
His farming eventually proved unsuccessful. He returned to education as an English teacher at Pinkerton Academy in New Hampshire from 1906 to 1911. After then at the New Hampshire Normal School in Plymouth, New Hampshire (now Plymouth State University).
In 1912, Frost moved with his family to Great Britain, first settling in Beaconsfield, a small town in Buckinghamshire outside London. His first book of poetry, A Boy’s Will, was published the following year.
In England, he made some important contacts, including Edward Thomas (a member of the group known as the Dymock poets and Frost’s inspiration for “The Road Not Taken” T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound. Although Pound became the first American to write a favorable. Frost’s Reviewing the work, Frost later resented Pound’s attempts to manipulate his American prosody.
Frost met or befriended many contemporary poets in England, especially after his first two volumes of poetry were published in London in 1913 (A Boy’s Will) and 1914 (An Answer to Boston).
Robert Frost’s Personal Life
Elinor and Robert Frost had six children. Son Elliot (1896-1900, died of cholera), daughter Leslie Frost Ballantine (1899-1983), son Carol (1902-1940), daughter Irma (1903-1967), daughter Marjorie (1905-1934, died) after childbirth puerperal fever), and daughter Elinor Bettina (died a day after her birth in 1907).
Only Leslie and Irma outlived their father. Frost’s wife, who had heart problems throughout her life, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1937 and died of heart failure in 1938.
The Road Not Taken
The American poet Robert Frost”s narrative poem is “The Road Not Taken” and was first published in the August 1915 issue of The Atlantic Monthly and later as the first poem in the 1916 poetry anthology and Mountain Interval. Its main theme is the removal of paths, both literally and figuratively. Possible differences were noted although its interpretation was complex.
The first publication in 1915 differs from the 1916 republication in the Mountain Interval. In line 13, “marked” was replaced by “reserved” and in line 18 a comma was replaced by a dash.
Style and critical reception
A critic Harold Bloom argued that “Robert Frost was one of the “major American poets. Randall Jarrell’s influential essays on Frost include “Robert Frost’s ‘Home Burial'” (1962), an extended critical reading of that particular poem, and “To the Laodiceans”, (1952) in which Jarrell defends Frost against critics who accuse him of frost.
Very “traditional” and out of touch with modernist poetry. Jarrell writes “The regular ways of looking at Frost’s poetry are grotesque simplifications, distortions, falsehoods.
Knowing his poetry well should be enough in itself to eliminate any of them and make clear the need to find another way. Talking about his work.” A close reading of poems such as Jarrell’s “Neither Out Too Far Nor In Too Deep” has led readers and critics to better appreciate the complexities of Frost’s poetry.
Brad Leithauser noted that “the ‘other’ Frost that Jarrell realized was the genius, the homespun New England rustic ‘dark’ Frost who became the scared, desperate, and brave Frost we’ve all come to know. The familiar poems referred to form the centerpiece of the short Jarrell Frost canon. Most are found in anthologies”. Jarrell made a selection of Frost’s particular poems which he considered his most masterful, including
- The Witch of Kos
- A Servant to Servants
- Home Funeral
- Directive
- Neither Out to Far Nor In
- Too Deep
- The Lovely Shall Be Choosers
- Deliver
- After Apple Picking
- Design
- Desert Place
- Get to Know the Night
- To Earthward
- Mending Wall
- The Most of It
- An Old Man’s Winter Night
- Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
- Evening
- Spring Pool
Awards and recognition
Although he never graduated from college. Frost received more than 40 honorary degrees, including from Princeton, Oxford, and Cambridge universities, and became the only person to receive two honorary degrees from Dartmouth College. During his lifetime, Robert Frost Middle School in Fairfax, Virginia, and Robert L. in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The Frost School and the main library at Amherst College were named after him.
In 1962. He was awarded the Edward McDowell Medal for Outstanding Contribution to the Arts by the McDowell Colony.
In June 1922, the Vermont State League of Women’s Clubs selected Frost as the Poet Laureate of Vermont. When a New York Times editorial strongly criticized the Women’s Club’s decision, Sarah Cleghorn and other women wrote in the newspaper defending Frost.
Frost was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1931 and to the American Philosophical Society in 1937.
