Robert Frost

1874-1963

Frost’s Childhood

Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874

After his father’s death in 1885, Frost’s mother moved the family to Massachusetts

Frost attended high school in Lawrence, Massachusetts

Frost entered Dartmouth College, but remained less than one semester.

Returning to Massachusetts, he taught school, worked in a mill, wrote for a newspaper, and worked on a farm.

Frost’s Adulthood

During his spare time, he wrote poetry and dreamed of someday being able to support himself by writing alone.

His first professional poem, "The Butterfly," was published on November 8, 1894, in the New York newspaper The Independent.

A year later he married Elinor White, with whom he had shared valedictorian honors at Lawrence (Mass.) High School.

From 1897 to 1899 he attended Harvard College as a special student but left without a degree.

Over the next ten years he wrote (but rarely published) poems, operated a farm in Derry, New Hampshire (purchased for him by his paternal grandfather), and supplemented his income by teaching at Derry's Pinkerton Academy.

Frost Farm, 1911

England In 1912, at the age of

38, he sold the farm and used the proceeds to take his family to England, where he could devote himself entirely to writing.

His efforts to establish himself and his work were immediately successful.

Triumphant Return

The Frosts sailed for the United States in February 1915 and landed in New York City two days after the U.S. publication of North of Boston (the first of his books to be published in America).

Sales of that book and of A Boy's Will enabled Frost to buy a farm in Franconia, N.H.; to place new poems in literary periodicals and publish a third book, Mountain Interval (1916); and to embark on a long career of writing, teaching, and lecturing.

Frost and son Carol 1916

In 1924 he received a Pulitzer Prize in poetry for New Hampshire (1923). He was lauded again for Collected Poems (1930), A Further Range (1936), and A Witness Tree (1942).

Over the years he received an unprecedented number and range of literary, academic, and public honors.

Poetic Style

An essentially pastoral poet often associated with rural New England, Frost wrote poems whose philosophical dimensions transcend any region.

Although his verse forms are traditional, he was a pioneer in the interplay of rhythm and meter and in the poetic use of the vocabulary and inflections of everyday speech.

His poetry is thus both traditional and experimental, regional and universal.

More Accolades

Frost became the country’s most beloved poet.

He received formal congratulations from the U.S. Senate when he turned 75, and again a decade later.

In January 1961 Frost read his poem The Gift Outright at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy

When he died 3 years later, people around the world mourned.

The Pasture

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;

I’ll only stop to rake leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may)

I sha’n’t be gone long. - You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf

That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young

It totters when she licks it with her tongue.

I sha’n’t be gone long. - You come too.

The Pasture

Robert Frost used this poem to introduce his poetry.

On the surface Frost invites the reader to come out to the pasture with him, but Frost also asks the reader to come into his world.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.