Robert Frost - Introduction & Biography

                Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California in 1874.  His father was William Frost, a journalist and a dedicated Democrat, died when Robert was around eleven years old.  His mother was Scottish, formally known as Isabelle Moody, and she was a schoolteacher to help support her family.  The Frost’s lived in Lawrence, Massachusetts with William Prescott Frost, Frost’s paternal grandfather, who provided his grandson with a good schooling.  Robert graduated from high school in 1892 and then he attended Dartmouth College for a few months.  He held a number of jobs over the next ten years.  Some jobs that he held was working in a textile mill and teaching Latin at his mother’s school in Methuen, Massachusetts.  The New York Independent published his poem ‘My Butterfly’ in 1894 and Frost had five poems printed privately.  He worked as a teacher and continued to write and publish his poems in magazines.  In 1895, Frost married Elinor White, a former schoolmate, and they had six children. Frost studied at Harvard from 1897 to 1899 but he left without receiving a degree.  He later moved to Derry, New Hampshire where he worked as a cobbler, farmer, and a teacher at Pinkerton Academy.  He also worked at the state normal school in Plymouth.  The Atlantic Monthly returned his poems that he sent with a note saying: “We regret that The Atlantic has no place for your vigorous verse.”  Frost and his family moved to England in 1912 after selling his farm.  While in England he published his first collection of poems, ‘A Boy’s Will’, at the age of 39.  Then in 1914 he published ‘North Boston’ and it gained universal standing.  Some of Frost’s best-known poems are ‘Mending Wall,’ ‘The Death of the Hired Man,’ ‘Home Burial,’ ‘A Servant to Servants,’ ‘After Apple-Picking,’ and ‘The Wood Pile.’  The poems that are written with blank verse or looser free verse of dialogue were obtained from his own life, recurrent losses, everyday tasks, and his loneliness.  Most of Frost’s poems show deep gratitude of the natural world and sensibility about the human desires.  Some images that Frost uses in his poems – woods, stars, houses, brooks, - are usually taken from everyday life.  He uses a down-to-earth tactic to his subjects and most readers find it easy to follow the poet into deeper truths, without being weighed down with literalism.  Frost often uses the rhythms and vocabulary of ordinary speech or even the looser free verse of dialogue.  In 1938 Frost’s wife died and he lost four of his children.  Two of his daughters suffered mental breakdowns.  His son Carol, a frustrated poet and farmer, committed suicide.  Frost died on January 29, 1963 and he was considered an unofficial poet winner of the United States.  Most of his poem illustrated the fields and farms of his surroundings, noticing the details of rural life, which hide complete meaning.  Most of his works were usually praised but the lack of significance concerning social and political problems of the 1930s aggravated some more socially orientated critics.  Lawrence Thompson presented Frost as a pessimist, uneducated, brutal, and angry man.  Jay Parini viewed Frost with sympathy.  He said that Frost was an outsider who liked company, a poet of seclusion who wanted a mass audience, and a rebel who sought to fit in.  Frost was a family man to the core but he often felt isolated from his wife and children and withdrew into daydreams.  Frost preferred to stay at home even though he traveled more than any poet of his generation to give lectures and readings.  Frost was terrified of public speaking up until he died.

"Robert Frost Biography." Famous Poets and Poems - Read and Enjoy Poetry. Web. 22 Feb. 2011. <http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/robert_frost/biography>.