Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco. His
father, William Prescott Frost, Jr., had been born in New Hampshire, the state
to which Robert Frost made his devious way back. As a boy he tried to enlist
in the Confederate army, a passionate displaced regionalism which his son
(appropriately named Robert Lee after the general) emulated, though he found
it necessary to change the region. William Frost determined to go west, but to
earn money for a year first as headmaster at a small private school in
Pennsylvania. The school had only on other teacher, Isabelle Moodie, a woman
six years older than himself, whom he courted and married. In may 1885 he died
of tuberculosis; his instructions were that he be buried in Lawrence,
Massachusetts, and his widow discharged this wish and then remained in the
East. Her son attended high school there from 1888 to 1892. He was an
excellent student of classics, and he also began to be known as a poet. In the
school another student of equal excellence was Elinor White. Frost resolved to
marry her, and it was characteristic of his tenacity that he succeeded in
doing so in spite of her delays and doubts. He won a scholarship to Dartmouth,
and she went to St. Lawrence College. Before a semester was over, Frost had
dropped out. He had hoped to persuade Elinor White to marry him at once, but
she insisted upon waiting until she had finished college. The ceremony did not
occur until 1895.
In 1897 Frost decided he must have his
Harvard education after all, and persuaded the authorities to admit him as a
special student (rather than a degree candidate). He was to say in later life
that this was a turning-point for him. At Harvard he could try himself against
the cultural powers of his time, and he could listen to philosophers like
Santayana and James. But again, in March 1899, he withdrew of his own accord.
On medical advice he thought he would live in the country, and his grandfather
bought him a farm in Derry, New Hampshire. These years, when money was short
and family life was especially difficult --- the Frosts had five children by
1905 --- were gloomy ones for Frost. He more than once meditated suicide. A
lift came when in 1906 he took a teaching job at Pinkerton Academy. During the
next five years he reformed its English syllabus, directed plays, and wrote
most of the poems later included in his first book.
In 1911 he
sold his farm, and in October he took ship with his family to Glasgow and then
went on to London. There was little reason to hope that publication of his
verse would be any easier in England than in the United States, but a month
after his arrival he submitted his poems to an English publisher and had them
accepted. A Boy's Will was published in 1913 and a second book, North
of Boston, in 1914.
In England Frost came to know the poets
of the time. Ezra Pound introduced him to Yeats, whom he had long admired, and
Frost also met imagists like F. S. Flint and Amy Lowell and became friendly
with the Georgian poets. Among these last his closest friend was Edward
Thomas, in whom he recognized something like an alter ego. This
pleasant idyll in England was broken into by the war, which forced him to
return in 1915 to the United States. There his luck held: the publisher Henry
Holt was easily persuaded to publish both his earlier books as well as
subsequent ones. Although Frost could not live on his poems, his poetry made
him much sought after by colleges and universities. In 1917 he began to teach
at Amherst, and he kept up for many years a loose association with this
college, intermixed with periods as professor or poet-in-residence elsewhere.
He was a frequent lecturer around the country and eventually became a goodwill
emissary to South America and then, at his friend President John F. Kennedy's
request, to the Soviet Union.
Frost's personal life was never
easy. He demanded great loyalty and was quick to suspect friends of treachery.
In 1938 his wife died, and in 1940 a son committed suicide. Nonetheless he was
showered with honors. Perhaps the most conspicuous was, at John F. Kennedy's
invitation, to read a poem at the presidential inauguration ceremony in 1961.
He had become by far the most recognized poet in America by the time of his
death, at the age of eighty-eight, on January 29, 1963.
__________
Ellmann, Richard and Robert O'Clair. Modern Poems: An
Introduction to Poetry.
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973, pp.
67-68.
