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
[William Frost] 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 one
other teacher, Isabella 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 then
remained in the East. Her son attended high school 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
has 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 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 the 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 closet 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 of 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 eight-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.
