Biography of Robert Frost

Robert Frost (1874-1963),

Robert Lee Frost (named after Southern General Robert E. Lee) was born on 26 March 1874 in San Francisco, California to Isabelle Moodie (1844-1900) teacher, and William Prescott Frost Jr. (1850-1885), teacher and journalist. He moved to New England at the age of eleven and became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, Massachusetts. After enrolling in Lawrence High School he was soon writing his own poems including “La Noche Triste” (1890) which was published in the school’s paper. He excelled in many subjects including history, botany, Latin and Greek, and played football, graduating at the head of his class.

In 1892 he entered Dartmouth, the Ivy League College in Hanover, New Hampshire, but soon became disenchanted with the atmosphere of campus life. He was enrolled later at Harvard, though he never earned a formal degree. In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, who became a major inspiration in his poetry until her death in 1938. In 1900 he and her wife moved to a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, which was purchased for him by his grandfather. He taught English at a private school, the Pinkerton Academy, from 1906 to 1911, and he taught English and psychology at a teacher’s college in Plymouth, New Hampshire, for a year in 1911–12.
He sold the Derry farm in 1911 and moved with his family to England the following year where he met the English Georgian poets Wilfred Gibson, Lascelles Abercrombie, and Edward Thomas and began writing poetry full-time. Although Frost had adopted rural New England life as his special subject matter, his first two books, A Boy’s Will (1913) andNorth of Boston (1914), were published in London before they appeared in the United States.

By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length collections, A Boy's Will and North of Boston, and his reputation was established. By the nineteen-twenties, he was the most celebrated poet in America, and with each new book—including New Hampshire (1923), A Further Range(1936), Steeple Bush (1947), and In the Clearing (1962)—his fame and honors (including four Pulitzer Prizes) increased

Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died in Boston on January 29, 1963. ‘Safe!, Now let the night be dark for all of me. Let the night be too dark for me to see, Into the future. Let what will be, be.’ (“Acceptance”) He lies buried in the family plot in the Old Bennington Cemetery behind the Old First Congregational Church near Shaftsbury, Vermont. His gravestone reads ‘I Had A Lover’s Quarrel With The World’

In a 1970 review of The Poetry of Robert Frost, the poet Daniel Hoffman describes Frost's early work as "the Puritan ethic turned astonishingly lyrical and enabled to say out loud the sources of its own delight in the world," and comments on Frost's career as The American Bard: "He became a national celebrity, our nearly official Poet Laureate, and a great performer in the tradition of that earlier master of the literary vernacular, Mark Twain."

some poems from Robert Frost:
Fire and Ice
The road not taken