Robert frost biography pdf
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Steeped in tragedy, Robert Frost’s poetry maintains a lasting appeal
At Robert Frost’s 85th birthday party at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel in 1959, critic Lionel Trilling toasted the poet by declaring his work “terrifying.”
This description may surprise most Americans, who nowadays are largely familiar with Frost through folksy fragments of his poems. One hundred years after the publication of his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” in the collection New Hampshire, which won him the first of four Pulitzer Prizes, shoppers can frequently find the poem’s closing lines — “And miles to go before I sleep” — adorning a variety of mundane merchandise.
The fact that he endures at all is a considerable feat, given that most of his contemporaries are read only in small numbers, if at all. Frost’s public stamina owes much to a masterful simplicity and a rugged pastoralism, which keeps him relevant even in modern times. Tragedy also plays a role, however, say scholars at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
“Anyone who has carefully read poems like “Home
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Robert Frost
(1874-1963)
Who Was Robert Frost?
Robert Frost was an American poet and winner of four Pulitzer Prizes. Famous works include “Fire and Ice,” “Mending Wall,” “Birches,” “Out Out,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay” and “Home Burial.” His 1916 poem, "The Road Not Taken," is often read at graduation ceremonies across the United States. As a special guest at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, Frost became a poetic force and the unofficial "poet laureate" of the United States.
Frost spent his first 40 years as an unknown. He exploded on the scene after returning from England at the beginning of World War I. He died of complications from prostate surgery on January 29, 1963.
Early Years
Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, California. He spent the first 11 years of his life there, until his journalist father, William Prescott Frost Jr., died of tuberculosis.
Following his father's passing, Frost moved with his mother and sister, Jeanie, to the town of Lawrence, Massachusetts. They moved in with his grandparents, and Frost attended
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Robert Frost
Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, where his father, William Prescott Frost, Jr., and his mother, Isabelle Moodie, had moved from Pennsylvania shortly after marrying. After the death of his father from tuberculosis when Frost was eleven years old, he moved with his mother and sister, Jeanie, who was two years younger, to Lawrence, Massachusetts. He became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, enrolled at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire in 1892 and, later, at Harvard University, 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 published poem, “My Butterfly,” appeared on November 8, 1894 in the New York newspaper The Independent.
In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, with whom he’d shared valedictorian honors in high school, and who was a major inspiration for his poetry until her death in 1938. The couple moved to England in 1912, after th
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