ROBERT FROST

'Robert Lee Frost' (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. His work frequently used themes from rural life in New England, using the setting to examine complex social and philosophical themes. A popular and often-quoted poet, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes.

Contents

Early life

Poet

Kennedy inauguration poems

Works

Selected works

Poetry

Poetry books

Plays

Prose

Published as

Pulitzer Prizes

Sources

Notes

External links

Early life

Although he is commonly associated with New England, Robert Frost was a native of California, born in San Francisco, and lived there until he was 11 years old. His mother, Isabelle Moodie Frost, was of Scottish descent; his father, William Prescott Frost, Jr., was a descendant of colonist Nicholas Frost from Tiverton, Devon who had sailed to New Hampshire in 1634 on the Wolfrana. Frost's father was a former teacher, and later an editor of the San Francisco ''Evening Bulletin'' (which was eventually merged into the San Francisco ''Examiner'', and an unsuccessful candidate for the city tax collector. ^[1]. The road not taken for young Robert might have been as a California editor rather than a New England poet, but William Frost, Jr. died on May 5, 1885, when Frost was 11. The family was left with eight dollars after the father's debts were settled, and moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts where William Frost, Sr., was an overseer at a New England mill. ^[2]. Frost's mother joined the Swedenborgian church and had him baptized in it, but he left it as an adult. Despite his later association with rural life, Frost lived in the city, and published his first poem in the Lawrence High School magazine. He and his future wife, Elinor Miriam White, were co-valedictorians at high school, and though Frost went on to Dartmouth College, he stayed for just over a semester, long enough to be accepted into the Theta Delta Chi fraternity. Frost returned home to teach and to work at various jobs including delivering newspapers and factory labor.

Poet

In 1894 he sold his first poem, "My Butterfly" (published in the November 8, 1894 edition of the New York ''Independent''^[3]) for fifteen dollars. Proud of this accomplishment, he proposed to Elinor, but she refused, wanting to finish college (at St. Lawrence University before they married. Frost then went on an excursion to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia, and asked Elinor again upon his return. Having graduated, she agreed, and they were married in December 1895. They taught school together until 1897. Frost then attended Harvard University for two years. He did well, but left to support his growing family. Grandfather Frost purchased a farm for the young couple in Derry, New Hampshire, shortly before his death. Frost worked on the farm for nine years, and wrote many of the poems that would later become famous. Legend has it that he milked his cows late at night so that he wouldn't have to do so early in the morning ^[2]. His attempts at farming were not successful, and Frost returned to education, as an English teacher at Pinkerton Academy from 1906 to 1911, then at the New Hampshire Normal School (now Plymouth State University) in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

In 1912, Frost sailed with his family to Great Britain, living first at Glasgow, before settling in Beaconsfield, outside London. His first book of poetry, ''A Boy's Will'', was published the next year. In England he made some important acquaintances including Edward Thomas (a member of the group known as the Dymock poets), T. E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound. Pound would become the first American to write a (favorable) review of Frost's work; surrounded by his peers, Frost wrote some of his best work while in England.
He returned to America in 1915, bought a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire, and launched a career of writing, teaching and lecturing. The family homestead at Franconia, which served as his summer home until 1938, is maintained as a museum and poetry conference site. From 1916 to 1938, Frost was an English professor at Amherst College, encouraging his students to account for the sound of the human voice in their craft. Starting in 1921, and for the next 42 years (with three exceptions), Frost spent his summers teaching at the "Bread Loaf School of English" of Middlebury College in Ripton, Vermont. The college now owns and maintains Robert Frost's Farm as a National Historic Site near the Bread Loaf campus.
Frost was 86 when he spoke at the inauguration of President Kennedy on January 20, 1961. He died a little more than two years later, in Boston, on January 29, 1963. He was buried at the Old Bennington Cemetery, in Bennington, Vermont. Harvard's 1965 alumni directory indicates his having received an honorary degree there; Frost also received honorary degrees from Bates College and Oxford and Cambridge universities, and he was the first to receive two honorary degrees from Dartmouth College. During his lifetime, the Robert Frost Middle School in Fairfax, Virginia, as well as the main library of Amherst College were named after him.

Kennedy inauguration poems

Though not notably associated with any political party, Frost is widely remembered for reciting a poem, "The Gift Outright", on January 20, 1961 at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. Nominally a tribute to the country's early colonial spirit ("This land was ours before we were the land's"), the poem ends on an optimistic, but characteristically ambivalent, note:
:''Such as we were we gave ourselves outright''
:''(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)''
:''To the land vaguely realizing westward,''
:''But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,''
:''Such as she was, such as she would become.''
Frost had intended to read another poem, "Dedication", which he had written specifically for Kennedy and for the occasion. But with feeble eyesight, unfamiliarity with the new poem, and difficulty reading his typescript in the bright January light, Frost chose only to deliver the poem he knew from memory (which he did in strong voice, despite his 86 years).
In April 2006, a handwritten copy of "Dedication" was donated to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, Massachusetts; it had come from the estate of one of Kennedy's special assistants (who had died the year before). On the manuscript, Frost had added "To John F. Kennedy, At his inauguration to be president of this country. January 20, 1961. With the Heart of the World," followed by, "Amended copy, now let's mend our ways." After removing the paper backing from the frame,
a Kennedy archivist discovered a faintly-legible handwritten note from Jacqueline Kennedy: "For Jack, January 23, 1961. First thing I had framed to put in your office. First thing to be hung there."^[5]
:''... The glory of a next Augustan age''
:''Of a power leading from its strength and pride,''
:''Of young ambition eager to be tried,''
:''Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,''
:''In any game the nations want to play.''
:''A golden age of poetry and power''
:''Of which this noonday's the beginning hour.''
Frost represented the United States on several official missions, including a meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. After the latter meeting, he told a press conference in New York on September 9, 1962 that "Krushchev said American liberals were too liberal to fight."^[6] The remark so angered Kennedy^[7] that he severed the hitherto cordial relations between himself and Frost, and refused so determinatively to speak to him again that he refused both Stewart Udall's request in January 1963 that he send the dying Frost a final message,^[8] and ignored (according to Kennedy biographer Richard Reeves) "pleas from the eighty-eight year old poet's deathbed."^[9] Frost's statement at the press conference may not have actually been accurate; in a letter he wrote to Norman Thomas, Frost said "I can't see how Khrushchev's talk got turned into what you quote that we weren't man enough to fight. I came nearer than he to threatening; with my native gentility I assured him that we were no more afraid of him than he was of us."⁶

Works

Over the course of his career, Frost also became known for poems involving dramas or an interplay of voices, such as "Death of the Hired Man". His work was highly popular in his lifetime and remains so. Among his best-known shorter poems are "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", "Mending Wall", "Nothing Gold Can Stay", "Birches", "Acquainted With the Night", "After Apple-Picking", "The Pasture", "Out Out", "Fire and Ice", "The Road Not Taken", and "Directive". Frost won the Pulitzer Prize four times, an achievement unequalled by any other American poet. Many of Frost's published works were illustrated with woodcut prints made by Frost's life-long friend and woodcut artist J. J. Lankes.
Frost was prolific, and poems are occasionally unearthed and published. The most recent instance is "War Thoughts at Home", written around 1918 on the inside cover of a book and published in Virginia Quarterly Review in 2006.[1] Nearly 700 pages of new poems, epigraphs, drafts and fragments appeared in ''The Notebooks of Robert Frost'', published January 2007.

Selected works

Poetry

★ ''A Boy's Will'' (David Nutt, 1913; Holt, 1915).

★ ''North of Boston'' (David Nutt, 1914; Holt, 1914).

★
★ 'Mending Wall'

★ ''Mountain Interval'' (Holt, 1916).

★
★ 'The Road Not Taken'

★ ''Selected Poems'' (Holt, 1923)

★ ''New Hampshire'' (Holt, 1923; Grant Richards, 1924).

★ ''Several Short Poems'' (Holt, 1924).

★ ''Selected Poems'' (Holt, 1928).

★ ''West-Running Brook'' (Holt, 1929).

★ ''The Lovely Shall Be Choosers'' (Random House, 1929).

★ ''Collected Poems of Robert Frost'' (Holt, 1930; Longmans, Green, 1930).

★ ''The Lone Striker'' (Knopf, 1933).

★ '' (Holt, 1934).

★ ''Three Poems'' (Baker Library, Dartmouth College, 1935).

★ ''The Gold Hesperidee'' (Bibliophile Press, 1935).

★ ''From Snow to Snow'' (Holt, 1936).

★ ''A Further Range'' (Holt, 1936; Cape, 1937).

★ ''Collected Poems of Robert Frost'' (Holt, 1939; Longmans, Green, 1939)

★ ''A Witness Tree'' (Holt, 1942; Cape, 1943).

★ ''Steeple Bush'' (Holt, 1947).

★ ''Complete Poems of Robert Frost'', 1949 (Holt, 1949; Cape, 1951).

★ ''Hard Not To Be King'' (House of Books, 1951).

★ ''Aforesaid'' (Holt, 1954).

★ ''A Remembrance Collection of New Poems'' (Holt, 1959).

★ ''You Come Too'' (Holt, 1959; Bodley Head, 1964)

★ ''In the Clearing'' (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1962)

★ ''The Poetry of Robert Frost'', (New York, 1969).

★ 'Fire and Ice' (1964)

★ 'Out Out' (Vermont 1964)

★ ''A Girl's Garden''

★ ''A Hundred Garden''

★ ''A Servant to Servants''

★ ''After Apple-Picking''

★ ''Birches''

★ ''Blueberries''

★ ''Dust of Snow''

★ ''For Once, Then Something''

★ ''Good Hours''

★ ''Good-bye, and Keep Cold''

★ ''Home Burial''

★ ''Mending Wall''

★ ''Neither Out Far Nor in Deep''

★ ''Nothing Gold Can Stay''

★ ''Once By The Pacific''

★ ''Puttingin the Seed''

★ ''Range-Finding''

★ ''Spring Pools''

★ ''Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening''

★ ''The Black Cottage''

★ ''The Code''

★ ''The Death of the Hired Man''

★ ''The Fear''

★ ''The Generations of Men''

★ ''The Housekeeper''

★ ''The Mountain''

★ ''The Oven Bird''

★ ''The Pasture''

★ ''The Rose Family''

★ ''The Self-seeker''

★ ''The Sound Of The Trees''

★ ''The Star-Splitter''

★ ''The Tuft of Flowers''

★ ''The Wood-Pile''

★ ''To E.T.''

★ ''Desert Places''

Poetry books

★ ''A Boy's Will'' (David Nutt, 1913; Holt, 1915).

Plays

★ ''A Way Out: A One Act Play'' (Harbor Press, 1929).

★ ''The Cow’s in the Corn: A One Act Irish Play in Rhyme'' (Slide Mountain Press, 1929).

★ ''A Masque of Reason'' (Holt, 1945).

★ ''A Masque of Mercy'' (Holt, 1947).

Prose

★ ''The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer'' (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963; Cape, 1964).

★ ''Robert Frost and John Bartlett: The Record of a Friendship'', by Margaret Bartlett Anderson (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963).

★ ''Selected Letters of Robert Frost'' (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964).

★ ''Interviews with Robert Frost'' (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966; Cape, 1967).

★ ''Family Letters of Robert and Elinor Frost'' (State University of New York Press, 1972).

★ ''Robert Frost and Sidney Cox: Forty Years of Friendship'' (University Press of New England, 1981).

★ ''The Notebooks of Robert Frost'', edited by Robert Faggen (Harvard University Press, forthcoming January 2007).[2]

Published as

★ ''Collected Poems, Prose and Plays'' (Richard Poirier , ed.) (Library of America, 1995) ISBN 978-1-88301106-2.

Pulitzer Prizes

★ 1924 for ''New Hampshire: A Poem With Notes and Grace Notes''

★ 1931 for ''Collected Poems''

★ 1937 for ''A Further Range''

★ 1943 for ''A Witness Tree'' ^[10]

Sources

★ Frost's Life and Career Pritchard, William H.

★ Robert Frost and J.J. Lankes: Riders on Pegasus, , Welford Dunaway, Taylor, Dartmouth College Library, 1996,

Notes

1. "Robert Frost," ''Current Biography 1942'', pp279-83
2. Id.
3. ''Current Biography 1942'', p. 280
4. Id.
5. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/21/AR2006042101378.html?nav=rss_artsandliving/entertainmentnews
6. They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions, , Paul F., Boller, Jr., Oxford University Press, 1989,
7. Dalleck, Robert, John F. ''Kennedy: An Unfinished Life 1917-1963'' (2003; London: Penguin, 2004), 540.
8. Reeves, Richard, ''President Kennedy: Profile of Power'' (1993; London: Papermac, 1994), 455.
9. Reeves, Richard, op. cit., plate 23.
10. http://www.pulitzer.org/cgi-bin/catquery.cgi?type=w&category=Poetry&FormsButton5=Retrieve

External links

★ Frost's lost poem "War Thoughts at Home" in The Virginia Quarterly Review

★ The Frost Place, a museum and poetry conference center in Franconia, N.H.

★ Poems by Robert Frost at PoetryFoundation.org

★ Frost at Modern American Poetry

★ Frost's interview in The Paris Review

★ Robert Frost at Bread Loaf (Middlebury College)

★ The Frost Foundation

★ Student finds Frost poem lost for 88 years

★ Robert Frost Farm in Derry, NH

★ Robert Frost Out Loud: audio recordings and commentary on many Frost poems

★ Robert Frost page on Ketzle.com - poems, links