Robert Frost
gigatos | March 31, 2022
Summary
Robert Lee Frost (English Robert Lee Frost, March 26, 1874, San Francisco – January 29, 1963, Boston) was an American educator, one of the greatest poets in American history, four-time Pulitzer Prize winner (1924, 1931, 1937, 1943).
Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California, the son of journalist William Prescott Frost, Jr. and Scottish immigrant Isabel Moody. He was named in honor of Robert E. Lee, commander-in-chief of the Confederate Army during the Civil War. His father was a descendant of Nicholas Frost of Tiverton, England, who sailed to New Hampshire in 1634 on the Wolfran. Frost was also a descendant of Samuel Appleton, one of the first settlers of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and Reverend George Phillips, one of the first settlers of Watertown, Massachusetts.
Frost”s father was a teacher and then editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin (which later merged with The San Francisco Examiner) and tried unsuccessfully to become a city tax collector. After his father died of tuberculosis (May 5, 1885), leaving the family with only eight dollars, the family moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where they lived under the care of Robert”s grandfather, William Frost Sr. Frost graduated from Lawrence High School in 1892. Frost”s mother joined the Swedenborgian church and baptized him in it, but he left it when he grew up.
Frost grew up in the city, though he is known for his connection to rural life. He published his first poem in his high school magazine. He attended Dartmouth College for two months, where he was accepted into the Theta Delta Chi fraternity. Frost returned home to teach and work, as well as to help his mother teach the naughty boys” class, deliver newspapers, and work in the coal arc lamp factory. Such work was not to Frost”s liking; he felt his true calling was poetry.
Married classmate Elinor White in 1895, published his first collection of poems the year before. Worked for a time as a schoolteacher and farmer. In 1897-99 he attended Harvard University. Of Robert and Elinor”s six children, two died in infancy. The many losses he faced in his youth predetermined the stoic pessimism of Frost”s worldview.
In 1900 Frost”s mother died of cancer. In 1920 he had to send his younger sister Jeanie to a psychiatric hospital, where she died nine years later. Mental illness apparently originated in Frost”s family, as he and his mother suffered from depression, and his daughter Irma was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in 1947. Frost”s wife, Elinor, also had bouts of depression.
Elinor and Robert Frost had six children: son Elliot (son Carol (daughter Marjorie (and Elinor”s daughter Bettina (died three days after her birth in 1907). Only Leslie and Irma survive their father. Frost”s wife, who had heart problems throughout her life, developed breast cancer in 1937 and died of heart failure in 1938.
Frost”s family spent the first decade of the twentieth century in a very precarious financial situation on a farm in New Hampshire. His poems could not find a publisher in the United States, so on the eve of his fortieth birthday Frost made the difficult decision to sell the farm and begin his literary career anew in London, where he departed in August 1912. There, with the assistance of Ezra Pound, he managed to publish (in 1913) his first poetry collection, A Boy”s Will, in which the influence of Wordsworth and Robert Browning is felt.
The rural realities of New England remained the external canvas of Frost”s poems throughout his career. The poet depicts the inhabitants of the countryside in their daily activities, which in his interpretation take on a profound philosophical content (“Mowing”). His favorite lyrical hero is the New Hampshire farmer. All these features are fully manifested in his second collection, North of Boston (1914), many of whose poems have become textbooks and are required reading in American schools (e.g., Mending Wall).
After the outbreak of World War I, Frost returned to New Hampshire, where he acquired a new farm, which, however, did not bring him profit. His fame in his homeland gradually grew, and in 1923 his fourth book, New Hampshire, won the Pulitzer Prize. It includes the lengthy narrative poems “Paul”s Wives,” “The Witches of Kos,” and a more lapidary and graceful meditative lyric. A focus on philosophizing and subtle psychologism distinguish “Blue in Places,” “Fire and Ice,” and “All Gold is Shaky.” The poems of those years indirectly reflected Frost”s study of the ancient Greek tragedians, especially Euripides. The national poet of the United States spent the rest of his life living on the campuses of various New England universities, often as a guest lecturer.
In his mature years, Frost often turns to the sonnet form, with motifs of hopeless loneliness and alienation (“Acquainted with the Night”) coming to the fore. The poems of the later Frost are saturated with metaphysical overtones (“Directive”) and direct biblical allusions (“Never Again Would Birds” Song Be The Same”).
“In the mass cultural consciousness, Frost quickly became a kindly wise grandfather, almost a singer of farm labor. He was honored with many distinctions, and in 1961 the poet was invited to read his poem The Gift Outright (1942) at President John F. Kennedy”s inauguration ceremony.
The poet”s last poetry collection, In the Clearing, appeared in 1962.
In that same year, 1962, at the request of U.S. President Kennedy, Frost visited the USSR as a “goodwill ambassador” and was warmly received at the Union of Soviet Writers. When asked by a journalist whether he found it difficult to communicate with Soviet people without knowing Russian, he replied: “But we laugh in the same language. During his conversation with N. S. Khrushchev, he called for a “noble rivalry” between the USSR and the United States to replace the conflicts. There was also a meeting between Frost and Anna Akhmatova, and she read him her new poem “The Last Rose” with an epigraph from I. Brodsky. Frost spoke of the “defining influence” of Ivan S. Turgenev on the formation of his creativity.
A peculiar feature of Frost”s poetic style is that episodes of everyday human activity invariably receive a multi-layered philosophical and metaphysical interpretation (“After Apple-Picking,” “Birches”). Continuing the Browningian tradition of dramatic monologue, Frost introduces verse dialogues filled with conversational intonations and subtle psychologism (“The Black Cottage,” “Home Burial,” the subject of Brodsky”s essay).
A large part of the poet”s poetic heritage plays with the theme of man”s relationship with eternal nature, which in Frost is fundamentally incomprehensible and alien to man, and often contains an immanent threat (“Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening” – the most textbook poem of 20th century American poetry). The results of human activity are lost in the vastness and meaninglessness of the world around us (“The Wood-Pile,” “The Most of It”).
Among the admirers of his talent are Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Joseph Brodsky. The latter, in his Nobel lecture, named Frost one of the five poets who most influenced his work.
Frost was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 31 times.
In June 1922 the Vermont League of Women”s Clubs elected Frost the Vermont Poet Laureate. When a New York Times editorial strongly criticized the decision of the women”s clubs, Sarah Cleghorn and other women wrote to the paper in defense of Frost.
On July 22, 1961, Frost was named Vermont Poet Laureate by the state legislature under Joint Resolution R-59 of Laws 1961, which also created the position.
Robert Frost received the Bollingen Prize in 1963.
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