Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874. When he was a child, his family moved to New England, and he stayed there most of his life. He started writing poems when he was sixteen, and he never stopped. He graduated at the top of his class, a rank he shared with the woman who would become his wife. Frost didn’t go to college, though his grandfather demanded that he attend Dartmouth. He spent his “college years” wandering the woods and reading poetry. He worked in mills and read and wrote. His first poem was published when he was nineteen.
Frost loved writing, but he needed to make a living. He tried his hand at journalism. He liked the writing, but he hated investigating stories. He became a teacher, first in high school, and then he married the love of his life. He started university classes to become a professor. He found the courses boring. Shortly after that, his newborn son died, and he gave up on getting a degree entirely. The Frosts were heartbroken. They left university life and bought a farm. Money was scarce, but their determination was in great supply. They worked on that farm for ten years until it was theirs, then sold it and moved to England.
Frost was still writing poetry and still getting rejected by publishers. He wrote poems for thirty-nine years before he got a publishing contract. His family returned to the US, where he was offered more contracts and many public speaking opportunities. He won four Pulitzer prizes in his lifetime and continued “writing about the whole world, about feelings and ideas that everyone, everywhere, understood.”
The Poems:
The Resources:
Videos
Websites
Poetry Foundation: Robert Frost
Books
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Photo of Poet: By Fred Palumbo, World Telegram staff photographer – Library of Congress. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c20742, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1273935
