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Poems of Robert Frost, 1874-1963

"Promises to Keep": Biographical Sketch by Anne White

"Before [Robert Frost] was out of his teens he was helping his mother teach school. But this wasn't what he wanted to do all his life. To think things out he took long, lone walks in the wood. There thoughts formed in his mind and he put them down on paper." (Doris Faber, introduction to Robert Frost: America's Poet)

The American poet Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) described Robert Frost's poetry as "verse that uses, sometimes with absolute mastery, the rhythms of actual speech." He also praised Frost's "seriousness and honesty," saying that Frost used not only real speech, but that he wrote about real people and genuine human experience. Most people think of Robert Frost as living a rural lifestyle, especially because of his famous poems about woods, trees, and fields. However, he was born in San Francisco, and spent much of his youth in Lawrence, a city in Massachusetts. His father died while Frost was a child, and his mother also died while he was still a young man. Because of these and other later family tragedies, Frost struggled with grief and depression. His gravestone contains a line from his poem "The Lesson for Today": "I had a lover's quarrel with the world."

Frost enrolled at Dartmouth College, but found his classes uninteresting. He preferred to read his copy of Palgrave's Golden Treasury, or to go off to the woods by himself. He dropped out of Dartmouth after only one term.

He sold his first poem, "My Butterfly," when he was nineteen years old, which gave him the confidence to ask his sweetheart Elinor White to marry him. At first she said no, because she wanted to graduate from college first; but they did marry soon afterwards.

Frost's grandfather bought the couple a small farm in New Hampshire, and they lived there for ten years. But Robert Frost, strangely enough, was not a success as a farmer. He taught school to help pay off his growing family's grocery bills.

"What is poetry?" Rob would ask the boys and girls in his class. Then he would answer his own question. "Poetry isn't strange. You've known it all the way from Mother Goose. It's some sort of make-believe that's got some sort of truth in it--a little bit that's so fascinating you can't get rid of it." (Doris Faber, Robert Frost: America's Poet)

Frost then took his family to England for three years, which gave him a chance to meet some important poets such as Ezra Pound. Two of his books, A Boy's Will and North of Boston, were published during that time.

Word War I caused the Frosts to return to America. They bought another farm, which became their summer home and which is still a museum and conference site. Robert Frost taught English at Amherst College and later at the University of Michigan. He lectured for over forty years at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont, a summer college course which encouraged many writers. He and Elinor also discovered that Florida was a nice warm place to spend the winter months; but Elinor died soon afterwards, in 1938.

Between 1924 and 1943, Robert Frost won four Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry, and he was also given honorary degrees, including two from Dartmouth College. In 1960, he was given a Congressional Gold Medal. He wrote a new poem for President Kennedy's inauguration in 1961, but because of the bright sunlight and the wind which kept blowing his paper, he found it impossible to read the words; so he recited his older poem "The Gift Outright" instead.

He died two years later, and was buried in Bennington, Vermont.