Robert Frost (1874-1963)

(Image Source: University of Massachusetts Lowell)

Robert Frost was born and raised (until the age of eleven) in San Francisco. He attended Dartmouth and Harvard College. For a decade, around the turn of the century, he worked as a farmer in New Hampshire. From 1912 until 1915 he, his wife, and their four children lived in England, where he met the poets Ezra Pound and Edward Thomas, both of whose shrewd reviews helped establish his reputation. Upon his return to America, Frost held a number of teaching appointments, his most enduring association being with Amherst College. In the year following the publication of his second book, North of Boston (1914), Frost became one of the best-known and most celebrated of American poets, and in 1961 he read his poem “The Gift Outright” at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. Rooted in the rugged New England landscape, his poems were phrased in plain speech, set to traditional meters made to sound classical forms. Some intellectuals dismissed him as provincial, and modernists who preferred conspicuous difficulty and radical innovation thought him conventional. Even Frost’s adoring public was often hoodwinked by his pithiness into missing the menacing forces at work beneath the surface. Astute readers saw an altogether different sensibility, however, one possessed of propensity toward darkness and terror, in which a poem is “a momentary stay against confusion.” (Biographical Summary from Norton's Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.)