12/11/22, 1:03 PM Robert Frost -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia

Robert Frost
Robert Frost, in full
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Robert Lee Frost,
(born March 26, Introduction
1874, San Francisco, Life
California, U.S.—
Works Legacy
Robert Frost
died January 29,
1963, Boston,

Massachusetts), American poet who was much admired for

his depictions of the rural life of New England, his command of American colloquial
speech, and his realistic verse portraying ordinary people in everyday situations.

Life

Frost’s father, William Prescott Frost, Jr., was a journalist with ambitions of establishing
a career in California, and in 1873 he and his wife moved to San Francisco. Her
husband’s untimely death from tuberculosis in 1885 prompted Isabelle Moodie Frost to
take her two children, Robert and Jeanie, to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where they were
taken in by the children’s paternal grandparents. While their mother taught at a variety of
schools in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, Robert and Jeanie grew up in Lawrence,
and Robert graduated from high school in 1892. A top student in his class, he shared
valedictorian honours with Elinor White, with whom he had already fallen in love.

Robert and Elinor shared a deep interest in poetry, but

their continued education sent Robert to Dartmouth
College and Elinor to St. Lawrence University.
Meanwhile, Robert continued to labour on the poetic
career he had begun in a small way during high
Derry: Robert Frost Farm school; he first achieved professional publication in
1894 when The Independent, a weekly literary
journal, printed his poem “My Butterfly: An Elegy.” Impatient with academic routine,
Frost left Dartmouth after less than a year. He and Elinor married in 1895 but found life
difficult, and the young poet supported them by teaching school and farming, neither with
notable
success. During the next dozen years, six children were born, two of whom died early,

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leaving a family of one son and three daughters. Frost resumed his college education at
Harvard University in 1897 but left after two years’ study there. From 1900 to 1909 the

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family raised poultry on a farm near Derry, New Hampshire, and for a time Frost also
taught at the Pinkerton Academy in Derry. Frost became an enthusiastic botanist and
acquired his poetic persona of a New England rural sage during the years he and his family
spent at Derry. All this while he was writing poems, but publishing outlets showed little
interest in them.

By 1911 Frost was fighting against discouragement. Poetry had always been considered a
young person’s game, but Frost, who was nearly 40 years old, had not published a single
book of poems and had seen just a handful appear in magazines. In 1911 ownership of the
Derry farm passed to Frost. A momentous decision was made: to sell the farm and use the
proceeds to make a radical new start in London, where publishers were perceived to be
more receptive to new talent. Accordingly, in August 1912 the Frost family sailed across
the Atlantic to England. Frost carried with him sheaves of verses he had written but not
gotten into print. English publishers in London did indeed prove more receptive to
innovative verse, and, through his own vigorous efforts and those of the expatriate
American poet Ezra Pound, Frost within a year had published A Boy’s Will (1913). From
this first book, such poems as “Storm Fear,” “The Tuft of Flowers,” and “Mowing”
became standard anthology pieces.

A Boy’s Will was followed in 1914 by a second collection, North of Boston, that introduced
some of the most popular poems in all of Frost’s work, among them “Mending Wall,” “The
Death of the Hired Man,” “Home Burial,” and “After Apple-Picking.” In London, Frost’s
name was frequently mentioned by those who followed the course of modern literature, and
soon American visitors were returning home with news of this unknown poet who was
causing a sensation abroad. The Boston poet Amy Lowell traveled to England in 1914, and
in the bookstores there she encountered Frost’s work. Taking his books home to America,
Lowell then began a campaign to locate an American publisher for them, meanwhile
writing her own laudatory review of North of Boston.

Without his being fully aware of it, Frost was on his way to fame. The outbreak of World
War I brought the Frosts back to the United States in 1915. By then Amy Lowell’s review
had already appeared in The New Republic, and writers and publishers throughout the
Northeast were aware that a writer of unusual abilities stood in their midst. The
American publishing house of Henry Holt had brought out its edition of North of Boston
in 1914. It became a best-seller, and, by the time the Frost family landed in Boston, Holt
was adding the American edition of A Boy’s Will. Frost soon found himself besieged by
magazines

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seeking to publish his poems. Never before had an American poet achieved such rapid

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fame after such a disheartening delay. From this moment his career rose on an ascending
curve.

Frost bought a small farm at Franconia, New

Hampshire, in 1915, but his income from both poetry
and farming proved inadequate to support his family,
and so he lectured and taught part-time at Amherst
College and at the University of Michigan from 1916
Robert Frost to 1938. Any remaining doubt about his poetic
abilities was dispelled by the collection Mountain
Interval (1916), which continued the high level established by his first books. His
reputation was further enhanced by New Hampshire (1923), which received the Pulitzer
Prize for poetry. That prize was also awarded to Frost’s Collected Poems (1930) and to the
collections A Further Range (1936) and A Witness Tree (1942). His other poetry volumes
include West-Running Brook (1928), Steeple Bush (1947), and In the Clearing (1962).
Frost served as a poet-in-residence at Harvard (1939–43), Dartmouth (1943–49), and
Amherst
College (1949–63), and in his old age he gathered honours and awards from every quarter.
He was the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (1958–59; the post was later styled
poet laureate consultant in poetry), and his recital of his poem “The Gift Outright” at the
inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961 was a memorable occasion .
Works
The poems in Frost’s early books, especially North of Boston, differ radically from late
19th-century Romantic verse with its ever-benign view of nature, its didactic emphasis, and
its slavish conformity to established verse forms and themes. Lowell called North of Boston
a “sad” book, referring to its portraits of inbred, isolated, and psychologically troubled rural
New Englanders. These off-mainstream portraits signaled Frost’s departure from the old
tradition and his own fresh interest in delineating New England characters and their
formative background. Among these psychological investigations are the alienated life of
Silas in “The Death of the Hired Man,” the inability of Amy in “Home Burial” to walk
the difficult path from grief back to normality, the rigid mindset of the neighbour in
“Mending Wall,” and the paralyzing fear that twists the personality of Doctor Magoon in
“A Hundred Collars.”

The natural world, for Frost, wore two faces. Early on he overturned the Emersonian
concept of nature as healer and mentor in a poem in A Boy’s Will entitled “Storm Fear,” a

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grim picture of a blizzard as a raging beast that dares the inhabitants of an isolated house to

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come outside and be killed. Later, in such poems as “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening” and “The Hill Wife,” the benign surface of nature cloaks potential dangers, and
death itself lurks behind dark, mysterious trees. Nature’s frolicsome aspect predominates
in other poems such as “Birches,” where a destructive ice storm is recalled as a thing of
memorable beauty. Although Frost is known to many as essentially a “happy” poet, the
tragic elements in life continued to mark his poems, from “‘Out, Out—’” (1916), in which
a lad’s hand is severed and life ended, to a fine verse entitled “The Fear of Man” from
Steeple Bush, in which human release from pervading fear is contained in the image of a
breathless dash through the nighttime city from the security of one faint street lamp to
another just as faint. Even in his final volume, In the Clearing, so filled with the stubborn
courage of old age, Frost portrays human security as a rather tiny and quite vulnerable
opening in a thickly grown forest, a pinpoint of light against which the encroaching trees
cast their very real threat of darkness.

Frost demonstrated an enviable versatility of theme, but he most commonly investigated

human contacts with the natural world in small encounters that serve as metaphors for
larger aspects of the human condition. He often portrayed the human ability to turn even
the slightest incident or natural detail to emotional profit, seen at its most economical form
in “Dust of Snow”:

The way a crow

Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

Other poems are portraits of the introspective mind possessed by its own private demons,
as in “Desert Places,” which could serve to illustrate Frost’s celebrated definition of
poetry as a “momentary stay against confusion”:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

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Frost was widely admired for his mastery of metrical form, which he often set against the
natural rhythms of everyday, unadorned speech. In this way the traditional stanza and
metrical line achieved new vigour in his hands. Frost’s command of traditional metrics is
evident in the tight, older, prescribed patterns of such sonnets as “Design” and “The Silken
Tent.” His strongest allegiance probably was to the quatrain with simple rhymes such as
abab and abcb, and within its restrictions he was able to achieve an infinite variety, as in
the aforementioned “Dust of Snow” and “Desert Places.” Frost was never an enthusiast of
free verse and regarded its looseness as something less than ideal, similar to playing tennis
without a net. His determination to be “new” but to employ “old ways to be new” set him
aside from the radical experimentalism of the advocates of vers libre in the early 20th
century. On occasion Frost did employ free verse to advantage, one outstanding example
being “After Apple-Picking,” with its random pattern of long and short lines and its
nontraditional use of rhyme. Here he shows his power to stand as a transitional figure
between the old and the new in poetry. Frost mastered blank verse (i.e., unrhymed verse
in iambic pentameter) for use in such dramatic narratives as “Mending Wall” and “Home
Burial,” becoming one of the few modern poets to use it both appropriately and well. His
chief technical innovation in these dramatic-dialogue poems was to unify the regular
pentameter line with the irregular rhythms of conversational speech. Frost’s blank verse has
the same terseness and concision that mark his poetry in general.
Legacy
Frost was the most widely admired and highly honoured American poet of the 20th
century. Amy Lowell thought he had overstressed the dark aspects of New England life, but
Frost’s later flood of more uniformly optimistic verses made that view seem antiquated.
Louis
Untermeyer’s judgment that the dramatic poems in North of Boston were the most
authentic and powerful of their kind ever produced by an American has only been
confirmed by later opinions. Gradually, Frost’s name ceased to be linked solely with
New England, and he gained broad acceptance as a national poet.

It is true that certain criticisms of Frost have never been wholly refuted, one being that he
was overly interested in the past, another that he was too little concerned with the present
and future of American society. Those who criticize Frost’s detachment from the “modern”
emphasize the undeniable absence in his poems of meaningful references to the modern
realities of industrialization, urbanization, and the concentration of wealth, or to such
familiar items as radios, motion pictures, automobiles, factories, or skyscrapers. The poet
has been viewed as a singer of sweet nostalgia and a social and political conservative who

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was content to sigh for the good things of the past.

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Such views have failed to gain general acceptance, however, in the face of the universality
of Frost’s themes, the emotional authenticity of his voice, and the austere technical
brilliance of his verse. Frost was often able to endow his rural imagery with a larger
symbolic or metaphysical significance, and his best poems transcend the immediate
realities of their subject matter to illuminate the unique blend of tragic endurance, stoicism,
and tenacious affirmation that marked his outlook on life. Over his long career, Frost
succeeded in lodging more than a few poems where, as he put it, they would be “hard to get
rid of,” among them “The Road Not Taken” (published in 1915, with its meaning disputed
ever since). He can be said to have lodged himself just as solidly in the affections of his
fellow Americans. For thousands he remains the only recent poet worth reading and the
only one who matters.

Philip L. Gerber The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Citation Information
Article Title: Robert Frost
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 22 March 2022
URL: https://www.britannica.comhttps://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Frost
Access Date: December 11, 2022

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