Robert Lee Frost, a poet whose work is often associated with the quaint rural surroundings of New England, was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874.  He lived there until the age of 11 when, after his father's death, he moved with his mother and sister to the Lawrence, Massachusetts, the home of his paternal grandparents. While in high school, he developed his interest for reading and writing poetry. Frost first attended Dartmouth College in New Hampshire but left after only a single semester (he later attended Harvard University from 1897 to 1899 but again left before obtaining a degree). Returning to Massachusetts, he found work in various fields from teaching to mill work to newspaper reporting. His first published poem ("My Butterfly: An Elegy") appeared in an 1894 issue the New York paper The Independent. The following year he married Elinor Miriam White, whom he'd met while attending Lawrence High School; they would go on to raise six children and remain married until her death in 1938.

From 1900 to 1912, Robert Frost continued to write poems but rarely published, spending his working days operating a farm in Derry, New Hampshire and teaching at Derry's Pinkerton Academy. In 1912, the couple sold their failed farm and moved to the Gloucestershire town of Dymock, England where Frost could focus on his writing full time-he had originally wanted to move to Vancouver, but a coin toss cemented his wife's choice of England. His first book, A Boy's Will, was published the subsequent year when Frost was 39; his second volume, North of Boston, appeared in 1914. While in England, he was influenced by contemporary British poets such as Robert Graves and Rupert Brooke, and befriended the likes of T.E. Hulme and Ezra Pound.

Frost returned to the United States in 1915, purchasing a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire and began a steady career as a writer, teacher, and lecturer-becoming, by the 1920s, one of the most celebrated poets in America. From 1916 to 1938, he taught at Amherst College and eventually garnered an astoundng four Pulitzer Prizes for his books New Hampshire (1923), Collected Poems (1930), A Further Range (1936), and A Witness Tree (1940). After spending a lifetime serving the poetic arts-both personally and as United States poet laureate in 1958-Robert Frost died in Boston on January 29, 1963 at the age of 88.

Among the honors Frost received during his lifetime was delivering a reading of his poem "The Gift Outright" at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961. His work has sometimes been incorrectly regarded as dated and as quaint as his New England landscapes, in part due to his unwillingness to write in free verse (he likened it to playing tennis without a net). However, closer examination of his poetry reveals a number of universal themes and a stark irony difficult to appreciate on a first reading. In an example of his acerbic wit, he was once asked why he chose to repeat the final line of his poem, "Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening" and sardonically replied that he couldn't think of another line. In truth, the haunting echo of the phrase "And miles to go before I sleep," remains a key piece of the poem's power and a keen example of Frost's brilliant manipulation of language. While choosing to work solely in metered and rhymed verse, his work retains (and at times surpasses) the mastery of his free verse contemporaries. Robert Frost is buried in Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont about 90 miles from the town of Ripton where he spent many of the last summers of his life.

Articles About Frost, Robert

The Frost Place - The Homes and Roads of Robert Frost	November 27, 2007
Our next stop was the Frost Place in Franconia, NH farther north on Interstate 93. The home is in the White Mountains not far from the highway. The small white house is on a dirt road on the side of a sloping hill that faces Lafayette Mountain.
The Frost Farm - The Homes and Roads of Robert Frost	November 27, 2007
For each reader of Frost there is a different poet and poem. We can make our own meaning of his work. To celebrate that work we left Boston, MA on a two day road trip through New Hampshire and Vermont to see how the states where the poet lived and wrote, remember him.
Spring Pools and Clock Towers: Robert Frost - Michigan's Poet-in-Residence	February 6, 2007
Robert Frost, four time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is said by some to have been the most widely read and continually anthologized American poet of the Twentieth Century. He won Pulitzers for New Hampshire (1923), Collected Poems (1930), A Further Range (1936), and A Witness Tree (1942). No other American poet has received that number of Pulitzer Prizes for their poetry or received such a high number of accolades from universities and foundations.