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He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. [1] His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. One of the most popular and critically respected American poets of his generation, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. Biography Early years Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California, to journalist William Prescott Frost, Jr. , and Isabelle Moodie. [1] His mother was of Scottish descent, and his father descended from Nicholas Frost of Tiverton, Devon, England, who had sailed to New Hampshire in 1634 on the Wolfrana. [citation needed] Frosts father was a teacher and later an 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, under the patronage of (Roberts grandfather) William Frost, Sr. , who was an overseer at a New England mill. Frost graduated from Lawrence High School in 1892. [2] Frosts mother joined the Swedenborgian church and had him baptized in it, but he left it as an adult. Although known for his later association with rural life, Frost grew up in the city, and he published his first poem in his high schools magazine. He attended Dartmouth College for two months, long enough to be accepted into the Theta Delta Chi fraternity. Frost returned home to teach and to work at various jobs – including helping his mother teach her class of unruly boys, delivering newspapers, and working in a factory as an arclight carbon filament changer. He did not enjoy these jobs, feeling his true calling was poetry. Adult years In 1894 he sold his first poem, My Butterfly. An Elegy (published in the November 8, 1894, edition of the New York Independent) for $15 ($398 today). Proud of his accomplishment, he proposed marriage to Elinor Miriam White, but she demurred, wanting to finish college (at St. Lawrence University) before they married. Frost then went on an excursion to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and asked Elinor again upon his return. Having graduated, she agreed, and they were married at Lawrence, Massachusetts on December 19, 1895. Frost attended Harvard University from 1897–1899, but he left voluntarily due to illness. [3][4][5] Shortly before dying, Roberts grandfather purchased a farm for Robert and Elinor in Derry, New Hampshire; and Robert worked the farm for nine years, while writing early in the mornings and producing many of the poems that would later become famous. Ultimately his farming proved unsuccessful and he returned to the field of education as an English teacher at New Hampshires Pinkerton Academy from 1906 to 1911, then at the New Hampshire Normal School (now Plymouth State University) in Plymouth, New Hampshire. In 1912 Frost sailed with his family to Great Britain, settling first in Beaconsfield, a small town outside London. His first book of poetry, A Boys Will, was published the next year. In England he made some important acquaintances, including Edward Thomas (a member of the group known as the Dymock Poets), T. E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound. Although Pound would become the first American to write a favorable review of Frosts work, Frost later resented Pounds attempts to manipulate his American prosody. Frost met or befriended many contemporary poets in England, especially after his first two poetry volumes were published in London in 1913 (A Boys Will) and 1914 (North of Boston). As World War I began, Frost returned to America in 1915 and bought a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire, where he launched a career of writing, teaching and lecturing. This family homestead served as the Frosts summer home until 1938. It is maintained today as The Frost Place, a museum and poetry conference site. During the years 1916–20, 1923–24, and 1927–1938, Frost taught English at Amherst College in Massachusetts, notably encouraging his students to account for the myriad sounds and intonations of the spoken English language in their writing. He called his colloquial approach to language the sound of sense. [6] In 1924, he won the first of four Pulitzer Prizes for the book New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes. He would win additional Pulitzers for Collected Poems in 1931, A Further Range in 1937, and A Witness Tree in 1943. [7] For forty-two years—from 1921 to 1963—Frost spent almost every summer and fall teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English of Middlebury College, at its mountain campus at Ripton, Vermont. He is credited as a major influence upon the development of the school and its writing programs. The college now owns and maintains his former Ripton farmstead as a national historic site near the Bread Loaf campus. In 1921 Frost accepted a fellowship teaching post at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he resided until 1927 when he returned to teach at Amherst. While teaching at the University of Michigan, he was awarded a lifetime appointment at the University as a Fellow in Letters. [8] The Robert Frost Ann Arbor home was purchased by The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan and relocated to the museums Greenfield Village site for public tours. In 1940 he bought a 5-acre (2. 0Â  ha) plot in South Miami, Florida, naming it Pencil Pines; he spent his winters there for the rest of his life. 9] His properties also included a house on Brewster Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that today belongs to the National Historic Register. Harvards 1965 alumni directory indicates Frost received an honorary degree there. Although he never graduated from college, Frost received over 40 honorary degrees, including ones from Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge universities, and was the only person to receive two honorary degrees from Dartmouth College. During his lifetime, the Robert Frost Middle School in Fairfax, Virginia, the Robert L. Frost School in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and the main library of Amherst College were named after him. Frost was 86 when he read his well-known poem The Gift Outright at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy on January 20, 1961. He died in Boston two years later, on January 29, 1963, of complications from prostate surgery. He was buried at the Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont. His epitaph quotes the last line from his poem, The Lesson for Today (1942): I had a lovers quarrel with the world. One of the original collections of Frost materials, to which he himself contributed, is found in the Special Collections department of the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts. The collection consists of approximately twelve thousand items, including original manuscript poems and letters, correspondence and photographs, as well as audio and visual recordings. [11] The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College holds a small collection of his papers. The most signi ficant collection of Frosts working manuscripts is held by Dartmouth. Style and critical response The poet/critic Randall Jarrell often praised Frosts poetry and wrote, Robert Frost, along with Stevens and Eliot, seems to me the greatest of the American poets of this century. Frosts virtues are extraordinary. No other living poet has written so well about the actions of ordinary men; his wonderful dramatic monologues or dramatic scenes come out of a knowledge of people that few poets have had, and they are written in a verse that uses, sometimes with absolute mastery, the rhythms of actual speech. He also praised Frosts seriousness and honesty, stating that Frost was particularly skilled at representing a wide range of human experience in his poems. [12] Jarrells notable and influential essays on Frost include the essays Robert Frosts Home Burial' (1962), which consisted of an extended close reading of that particular poem, and To The Laodiceans (1952) in which Jarrell defended Frost against critics who had accused Frost of being too traditional and ou t of touch with Modern or Modernist poetry. In Frosts defense, Jarrell wrote the regular ways of looking at Frosts poetry are grotesque simplifications, distortions, falsificationscoming to know his poetry well ought to be enough, in itself, to dispel any of them, and to make plain the necessity of finding some other way of talking about his work. And Jarrells close readings of poems like Neither Out Too Far Nor In Too Deep led readers and critics to perceive more of the complexities in Frosts poetry. 13][14] In an introduction to Jarrells book of essays, Brad Leithauser notes that, the other Frost that Jarrell discerned behind the genial, homespun New England rustic—the dark Frost who was desperate, frightened, and brave—has become the Frost weve all learned to recognize, and the little-known poems Jarrell singled out as central to the Frost cannon are now to be found in most anthologies. [15][16] Jarrell lists a selection of the Frost poems he considers the most masterful, including The Witch of Coos, Home Bur ial, A Servant to Servants, Directive, Neither Out Too Far Nor In Too Deep, Provide, Provide, Acquainted with the Night, After Apple Picking, Mending Wall, The Most of It, An Old Mans Winter Night, To Earthward, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, Spring Pools, The Lovely Shall Be Choosers, Design, [and] Desert Places. [17] In The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, editors Richard Ellmann and Robert OClair compared and contrasted Frosts unique style to the work of the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson since they both frequently used New England settings for their poems. However, they state that Frosts poetry was less [consciously] literary and that this was possibly due to the influence of English and Irish writers like Thomas Hardy and W. B. Yeats. They note that Frosts poems show a successful striving for utter colloquialism and always try to remain down to earth, while at the same time using traditional forms despite the trend of American poetry towards free verse which Frost famously said was like playing tennis without a net. [18] In providing an overview of Frosts style, the Poetry Foundation makes the same point, placing Frosts work at the crossroads of nineteenth-century American poetry [with regard to his use of traditional forms] and modernism [with his use of idiomatic language and ordinary, every day subject matter]. They also note that Frost believed that the self-imposed restrictions of meter in form was more helpful than harmful because he could focus on the content of his poems instead of concerning himself with creating innovative new verse forms. [20] Personal life Robert Frosts personal life was plagued with grief and loss. In 1885 when Frost was 11, his father died of tuberculosis, leaving the family with jus t eight dollars. Frosts mother died of cancer in 1900. In 1920, Frost had to commit his younger sister Jeanie to a mental hospital, where she died nine years later. Mental illness apparently ran in Frosts family, as both he and his mother suffered from depression, and his daughter Irma was committed to a mental hospital in 1947. Frosts wife, Elinor, also experienced bouts of depression. 8] Elinor and Robert Frost had six children: son Elliot (1896–1904, died of cholera); daughter Lesley Frost Ballantine (1899–1983); son Carol (1902–1940, committed suicide); daughter Irma (1903–1967); daughter Marjorie (1905–1934, died as a result of puerperal fever after childbirth); and daughter Elinor Bettina (died just three days after her birth in 1907). Only Lesley and Irma outlived their father. Frosts wife, who had heart problems throughout her life, developed breast cancer in 1937,