Robert Frost: Life, Poetry, and Enduring Legacy
Robert Frost: American Poet (1874-1963)
Born on March 26, 1874, Robert Frost spent his first 40 years largely unknown. He gained widespread recognition after returning from England at the beginning of World War I. He was a winner of four Pulitzer Prizes and a special guest at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. Frost died of complications from prostate surgery on January 29, 1963. He was seen as a quintessential American poet, yet paradoxically, he was one of the least experimental among modernist poets.
Early Life and Education
Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California. He spent the first 12 years of his life there until his father died of tuberculosis. Frost then moved with his mother and sister to Lawrence, Massachusetts. They moved in with his grandparents, and Frost attended Lawrence High School, where he met his future wife, Elinor White. Frost attended Dartmouth College for several months, returning home to work. He proposed to Elinor, who was attending St. Lawrence University. She initially declined, wanting to finish school first. Frost then decided to leave on a trip to Virginia, and when he returned, he proposed again. By then, Elinor had graduated from college, and she accepted. They married in December and soon after had their first child.
Farm Life and Personal Tragedies
In 1900, Frost moved with his wife and children to a farm in New Hampshire, where they attempted to make a life for the next 12 years. While it was a fruitful time for Frost’s writing, it was a difficult period in his personal life. They had six children in total, but only four survived to adulthood, and his personal life was marked by profound loss and tragedy, including the deaths of four of his six children and the institutionalization of a daughter. Despite such challenges, it was during this time that Frost acclimated himself to rural life. In fact, he began writing many of his notable poems in the countryside, including Mowing and The Tuft of Flowers (both published in 1913).
Literary Acclaim and Pulitzer Prizes
Frost received over 40 honorary degrees during his lifetime. In 1924, he received his first of four Pulitzer Prizes for his collection New Hampshire. He subsequently won his other Pulitzers for Collected Poems (1931), A Further Range (1937), and A Witness Tree (1943).
Poetic Form, Style, and Subject Matter
Ambiguity was a hallmark of his work. Frost consistently wrote in traditional forms, including blank verse and sonnets. His subject matter was also traditional, often focusing on 19th-century American life and pastoral themes. His poetry often reflected a nostalgic view, embracing pastoral and farm life. While he attempted to make a successful life on the farm, he ultimately faced difficulties. Despite his personal struggles, Frost cultivated the public image of a benevolent, wise poet, often writing in the first person. The titles of his poems often underscored his connection to America. From his breakthrough, he moved from success to success, establishing himself as a pioneering figure in several respects. Frost was not an innovator, and his technique was never experimental. He aligned with T. S. Eliot’s idea that the man who suffers and the artist who creates are entirely separate entities. Frost enriched his style by juxtaposing traditional meters with the natural rhythms of speech. He avoided artificial poetic diction by employing the accent of a soft-spoken New Englander. He believed the poet’s ear must be sensitive to the human voice to capture the significance of sound in the spoken word through written verse. Frost’s regionalism stemmed from his realism, not from political agendas; he did not create a picture of regional unity or a strong sense of community. Frost’s protagonists are often portrayed as individuals constantly forced to confront their own individualism and, at times, to reject the modern world to retain their identity.
Nature, Regionalism, and Human Identity
Frost’s use of nature is not only similar to but also closely tied to his regionalism. He remained as clear of religion and mysticism as he did of politics. What he found in nature was sensuous pleasure; he was also sensitive to the earth’s fertility and to humanity’s relationship with the soil. According to critic M. L. Rosenthal, Frost’s pastoral quality—his “lyrical and realistic repossession of the rural and ‘natural’”—is the cornerstone of his reputation. Frost was aware of the distances between individuals, and thus he was also always aware of the distinction, the ultimate separateness, between nature and humanity. Despite this separateness, he often portrayed an amicable attitude between individual man and natural forces. His austere and tragic view of life, which emerges in so many of Frost’s poems, is modulated by his metaphysical use of detail. As Frost portrays humanity, individuals might be alone in an ultimately indifferent universe, but they may nevertheless look to the natural world for metaphors of their own condition. Thus, in his search for meaning in the modern world, Frost focused on those moments when the seen and the unseen, the tangible and the spiritual, intersected. His work shows thematic connections with poets like Emily Dickinson and thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson.