Robert (Lee) Frost (1874-1963)
American poet, one of the finest of rural New England's 20th century pastoral poets. Frost published his first books in Great Britain in the 1910s, but he soon became in his own country the most read and constantly anthologized poet, whose work was made familiar in classrooms and lecture platforms. Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize four times. Nature and Frost's rural surroundings were for him a source for insights "from delight to wisdom", or as he also said: "Literature begins with geography."
FIRE AND ICE
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California. His father William Prescott Frost Jr., a journalist and an ardent Democrat, died when Frost was about eleven years old. To support her family, Frost's Scottish mother, the former Isabelle Moody, resumed her career as a schoolteacher. They moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where Frost's paternal grandfather, William Prescott Frost, gave his grandson a good schooling.
After graduating from a high school in 1892, Frost attended Darthmouth College for a few months. Over the next ten years he held a number of jobs. Frost worked among others in a textile mill and taught Latin at his mother's school in Methuen, Massachusetts. In 1894 the New York Independent published Frost's poem 'My Butterfly', earning him $15. He had also five poems privately printed. While working as a teacher Frost continued to write and publish his poems in magazines. In 1895 he married a former schoolmate, Elinor Miriam White; they had six children.
From 1897 to 1899 Frost studied at Harvard, but left without receiving a degree due family problems and poor health. He moved to Derry, New Hampshire, working there as a cobbler, farmer, and teacher at Pinkerton Academy - he held the post for five years - and at the state normal school in Plymouth. When he sent his poems to The Atlantic Monthly they were returned with this note: "We regret that The Atlantic has no place for your vigorous verse."
In 1912 Frost sold the Derry farm and took his wife and four young children to England. There he published his first collection of poems, A BOY'S WILL, at the age of 39. It was followed by NORTH BOSTON (1914), which gained international reputation. The collection contains some of Frost's best-known poems: 'Mending Wall,' 'The Death of the Hired Man,' 'Home Burial,' 'A Servant to Servants,' 'After Apple-Picking,' and 'The Wood-Pile.' The poems, written with blank verse or looser free verse of dialogue, were drawn from his own life, recurrent losses, everyday tasks, and his loneliness. "This is one of the most revolutionary books of modern times," wrote the British poet and essayist Edward Thomas (1878-1917), Frost's friend, in his review in the Daily News, "but one of the quietest and least aggressive. It speaks, and it is poetry."
While in England Frost became acquainted with the F.S. Flint, Edward Thomas, and Ezra Pound, who called Frost's poems "modern georgics", and the Georgian Poets Wilfred Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie. In 1915 he returned to the US in 1915 with his family and bought a farm near Franconia, New Hampshire. When the editor of The Atlantic Monthly asked for poems, he gave the very ones that had previously been rejected. Frost taught later at Amherst College (1916-38) and Michigan universities. In 1916 he was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. On the same year appeared his third collection of verse, MOUNTAIN INTERVAL, which contained such poems as 'The Road Not Taken,' 'The Oven Bird,' 'Birches,' and 'The Hill Wife.'
Frost's poems show deep appreciation of natural world and sensibility about the human aspirations. His images - woods, stars, houses, brooks - are usually taken from everyday life. With his down-to-earth approach to his subjects, readers found it is easy to follow the poet into deeper truths, without being burdened with pedantry. Often Frost used the rhythms and vocabulary of ordinary speech or even the looser free verse of dialogue.
In 1920 Frost purchased a farm in South Shaftsbury, Vermont, near Middlebury College, where he cofounded the Bread Loaf School and Conference of English. His wife died in 1938 and he lost four of his children. Two of his daughters suffered mental breakdowns, and his son Carol, a frustrated poet and farmer, committed suicide in 1940. Frost also suffered from depression and the continual self-doubt led him to cling to the desire to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In A Masque of Reason (1945) and A Masque of Mercy (1947), using the Old Testament characters of Job and Jonah, Frost examined the complex relationship between man and God. After the death of his wife, Frost became strongly attracted to Kathleen (Kay) Morrison, whom he employed from 1938 as his secretary and adviser, but who probably became also his lover. Frost also composed for her one of his finest love poems, 'A Witness Tree.'
With his future biographer, Lawrance Thompson, Frost travelled in 1957 to England, and to Israel and Greece in 1961. He participated in the inauguration of President John Kennedy in 1961 by reciting two of his poems. When the sun and the wind prevented him from reading his new poem, 'The Preface', Frost recited his old poem, 'The Gift Outright', from memory. In 1962 Frost travelled in the Soviet Union as a member of a goodwill group. He had a long talk with Premier Nikita Khrushchev, whom he described admiringly as "no fathead"; as smart, big and "not a coward." Frost also reported that Khrushchev had said the United States was "too liberal to fight," it caused a considerable stir in Washington. Among the honors and rewards Frost received were tributes from the U.S. Senate (1950), the American Academy of Poets (1953), New York University (1956), the Huntington Hartford Foundation (1958), the Congressional Gold Medal (1962), the Edward MacDowell Medal (1962). In 1930 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Amherst College appointed him Saimpson Lecturer for Life (1949), and in 1958 he was made poetry consultant for the Library of Congress.
At the time of his death on January 29, 1963, Frost was considered a kind of unofficial poet laureate of the US. "I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world," Frost once said. Frost depicted the fields and farms of his surroundings, observing the details of rural life, which hide universal meaning. His independent, elusive, half humorous view of the world produced such remarks as "I never take my side in a quarrel", or "I'm never serious except when I'm fooling." Although Frost's works were generally praised, the lack of seriousness concerning social and economic problems of the 1930s, and his hostility toward the policies of the New Deal annoyed some more socially orientated critics. "Political freedom is nothing to me. I bestow it right and left," Frost stated in 'The Figure a Poem Makes', first published in 1939 as the preface to an edition of his Collected Poems. Later biographers have created a complex and contradictory portrait of the poet. In Lawrance Thompson's three-volume official biography (1966-1976) Frost was presented as a misanthrope, anti-intellectual, cruel, and angry man, but in Jay Parini's work (1999) he was again viewed with sympathy: ''He was a loner who liked company; a poet of isolation who sought a mass audience; a rebel who sought to fit in. Although a family man to the core, he frequently felt alienated from his wife and children and withdrew into reveries. While preferring to stay at home, he traveled more than any poet of his generation to give lectures and readings, even though he remained terrified of public speaking to the end..."
