Robert Frost

Introduction

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California. His father William Prescott Frost Jr., a journalist and an ardent Democrat, died of tuberculosis 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. Belle, as Frost's mother was called, was a cultured, intelligent woman, but known as a poor teacher, who could not control the class.

After graduating from Lawrence High School in 1892, Frost attended Darthmouth College for a few months. Most probably he was expelled after participating in a sadistic prank. Over the next ten years Frost held a number of jobs, he worked in a textile mill and on a farm, and taught Latin at his mother's school in Methuen, Massachusetts.

Discussion

On November 8, 1894, the New York newspaper Independent published Frost's poem 'My Butterfly', earning him $15. He had it privately printed with four other poems, in an edition of two copies. While working as a teacher Frost continued to write and publish his poems in magazines. In 1895 he married a former schoolmate from Lawrence, Elinor Miriam White; they had six children. A Swedenborgian minister conducted the wedding. In 1984, when Frost had tried to persuade Elinor to marry him, and gave her the other copy of the Twilight, she had rejected him. Frost destroyed his own copy and half-heartedly tried to commit suicide in the Dismal Swamp.

Frost was admitted as a special student in 1897 to Harvard, where he studied Latin and Greek, and philosophy under George Santayana. In 1900 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 then at the state normal school in Plymouth. By that time Frost had already given up farming. 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."(Anderson,163)

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.(Anderson,163)

In 1920 Frost purchased a farm in South Shaftsbury, Vermont, near Middlebury College, and in 1939 he purchased as his summer residence the Homer Noble farm, in Ripton. Most of the year Frost spent in Cambridge. His last permanent home was at 35 Brewster Street. Frost taught at Amherst College, the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and Dartmouth College. For nearly fifty years, until two months before his death, Frost gave poetry readings. (Burnshaw,196)

Frost lost four of his children. Elinor Bettina, born in ...