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| Poetry is what gets lost in translation. |
Robert Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26,
1874. He moved to New England at the age of eleven and became
interested in reading and writing poetry during his high
school years in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was enrolled at Dartmouth College
in 1892, and later at Harvard, though he never earned a formal degree.
Frost drifted through a string of occupations after leaving
school, working as a teacher, cobbler, and editor of the
Lawrence Sentinel. His first professional poem, "My
Butterfly," was published on November 8, 1894, in the New York
newspaper The Independent.
In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, who became a
major inspiration in his poetry until her death in 1938. The
couple moved to England in 1912, after their New Hampshire
farm failed, and it was abroad that Frost met and was
influenced by such contemporary British poets as Edward
Thomas, Rupert Brooke, and Robert Graves. While in England, Frost also
established a friendship with the poet Ezra Pound, who helped to promote and
publish his work.
By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he
had published two full-length collections, A Boy's Will and North of Boston,
and his reputation was established. By the nineteen-twenties, he was the most
celebrated poet in
America, and with each new book—including New Hampshire
(1923), A Further Range (1936), Steeple Bush (1947), and In the Clearing
(1962)—his fame and honors (including four Pulitzer Prizes) increased.
Though his work is principally associated with the life and
landscape of New England, and though he was a poet of
traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly
aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his time, Frost is anything but
a merely regional or minor poet. The author of searching and often dark
meditations on universal themes, he is a quintessentially modern poet in his
adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity
of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of
ambiguity and irony.
In a 1970 review of The Poetry of Robert Frost, the poet
Daniel Hoffman describes Frost's early work as "the Puritan ethic turned
astonishingly lyrical and enabled to say out loud the sources of its own
delight in the world," and comments on Frost's career as The American
Bard: "He became a national celebrity, our nearly official Poet Laureate,
and a great
performer in the tradition of that earlier master of the
literary vernacular, Mark Twain."
About Frost, President John F. Kennedy said, "He has
bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which
Americans will forever gain joy and understanding."
Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in
Massachusetts and Vermont, and died in Boston on January 29, 1963.
1:29 AM
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