Robert Lee Frost, b. San Francisco, Mar. 26, 1874 d. Boston, Jan. 29, 1963, was one of the leading poets of the 20th-century and a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Frost was a poet often associated with rural New England, although his poems could be felt and related to in any region of the world. Thought his younger days may have not been filled with other children having fun and such, Frost made the best of what he enjoyed. At the young age of only eleven Frost’s father passed away. Soon after his death the family left California to settle in Massachusetts.
As young Frost grew up he attended high school in that state, later would enter Dartmouth College, but would remain there less that one semester. Later he returned to Massachusetts where he would be a school teacher along with two other jobs he held as a mill worker and a newspaper reporter. Then in 1895 Frost married Elinor White whom he had been co-valedictorians with in high school. Then between 1897 and 1899 Frost felt the need to go back to college he attended Harvard as a special student-only to leave without a degree.
Over the next ten years, he would write more poetry. Frost would live on and operate a farm in Derry, New Hampshire that his grandfather had purchase for him with the condition he live there for a minimum of ten years. He would also take a teaching position at Derry’s Pinkerton Academy to receive another form of income. Frost would not stay there long, as he felt the need to once again move.
In 1912, when Frost was nearly forty he sold the farm and used the proceeds to take his family to England, where he could devote himself entirely to writing. Frost would establish himself quickly and would reap the awards of immediate success. In 1894 at the age of twenty Frost sold and published his first poem ‘My Butterfly:An Elegy’; to The Independent, a New York literary journal. This was his first step in the long line of success that he would encounter. Only a year after Frost arrived in England his book ‘A Boy’s Will’; was accepted and published. With the help of favorable reviews on both sided of the Atlantic, a American publisher published his book.
The Henry Holt and Company became Frosts primary American Publisher. From this Frost now had a secure reputation on two continents. In February 1915 Robert Frost and his family sailed for the United States reaching New York City two day after the publication of ‘North of Boston’;. Sales from the books that Frost had published enabled him to buy a farm in Franconia, N. H. and send him on his way to a long and successful career in writing, teaching, and lecturing.
Over the coming years he would receive a number of literary, academic, and public honors. He Received four prestige’s Pulitzer Prizes in his lifetime. Frost lived his life doing what made him happy and that was writing poetry. Frost spent the last years of his life-giving interviews and public speaking. On December 2nd, 1962 in Boston, Frost would give his last public speech.
The following day Frost enter the hospital there eight weeks later he would lose his struggle for life. A few weeks before Frost’s death he gave an interview saying something on what life may mean. ‘I guess I don’t take life very seriously. It’s hard to get into this world and hard to get out of it . And what’s in between doesn’t make much sense.
‘; (Lathem 295)Not everthing Frost wrote said or did was liked by everyone he had his archrivals, his critics, and his enemys. He often wrote in traditional verse form and not free verse. ‘. .
. —he often said, in a dig at archrival Carl Sandburg, that he would as soon play tennis without a net as write free verse–he was a pioneer in the interplay of rhythem and meter and in the poetic use of the vocabulary and inflections of everyday speech, His poetry is thus both traditional and experimental, regional and universal. ‘; (Amer. Encylopedia 1) Frost’s conservatism caused him to lose favor with his crictics.
But that would never affect his reputation as a major poet.
