Robert Frost

The voice that so many readers associate with stone walls, snowy woods, farm chores, and New England weather began far from that landscape. Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874, the son of journalist William Prescott Frost Jr. and Isabelle Moodie, a Scottish immigrant. After his father died in 1885, the family moved across the country to Lawrence, Massachusetts, under the care of Frost’s grandfather. Frost grew up in the city, even though he would become known for writing with rare clarity about rural life.

At Lawrence High School, Frost published his first poem in the school magazine, served as class poet, and graduated in 1892 as co-valedictorian with Elinor White, his future wife. He attended Dartmouth College briefly, then returned home to teach and take on a string of jobs, including delivering newspapers and working in a factory maintaining carbon arc lamps. He did not enjoy that work. He felt his real calling was poetry, and in 1894 he sold his first poem, “My Butterfly. An Elegy,” to The Independent of New York for $15. He and Elinor married in Lawrence on December 19, 1895.

Frost attended Harvard University from 1897 to 1899, leaving because of illness. Soon after, his grandfather bought a farm for Robert and Elinor in Derry, New Hampshire. Frost worked the farm for nine years, writing early in the mornings and producing many poems that later became famous. The farming itself did not succeed, and he returned to education, teaching at Pinkerton Academy and then at the New Hampshire Normal School in Plymouth. These years gave him close experience with work, speech, difficulty, and ordinary people, all of which became central to his art.

In 1912, Frost sailed with his family to Great Britain and settled in Beaconsfield, outside London. His first book, A Boy’s Will, appeared in 1913, followed by North of Boston in 1914. In England he met important writers, including Edward Thomas, T. E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound; Thomas later became Frost’s inspiration for “The Road Not Taken.” Frost returned to America in 1915 during World War I, bought a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire, and built a public life of writing, teaching, and lecturing.

Frost became famous for realistic depictions of rural New England life and for his command of American colloquial speech. At Amherst College, where he taught during several periods between 1917 and 1938, he urged students to listen to “the sound of sense,” the tones and turns of spoken English. He also taught for many summers and falls at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont. His honors were many: he received four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry, for New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes, Collected Poems, A Further Range, and A Witness Tree. He was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1958, received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960, and was named poet laureate of Vermont in 1961.

Frost died on January 29, 1963, after a life spent turning plain speech into art. His poems often begin in familiar places, a road, a wall, a field, a house, then open onto harder questions about choice, loss, work, and human stubbornness. That is why lines such as “The only way out is through” still feel direct rather than distant. Frost wrote as if wisdom could be found in the way people talk, hesitate, argue, and keep going.