Lecture XII Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)

Despite the fact that Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California, his forebears for nine generations had been New Englanders, and most of his life, from 1885 to his death, he lived in New England. Frost’s father died in San Francisco, when the boy was ten, and the widow went east to Lawrence, Massachusetts, with her children, to live with their grandfather.

Frost attended school in Lawrence and did such good work that, at graduation, he was high school valedictorian. In the autumn of 1892 Frost entered Dartmouth, but finding college life unattractive, he shortly withdrew. During the next few years, he worked in a mill for a time, took a tramping trip through the South, did some teaching, some newspaper work, and married Elinor White, who in high school had been his only rival for valedictorian. In 1897 he tried college again, this time Harvard, where he enjoyed the study of Latin, Greek and Philosophy. At the end of two years, however, he again left college and moved to a farm near Derry, New Hampshire, which had been given to him by his grandfather. Because farming proved rather unprofitable, Frost turned to teaching at nearby Pinkerton Academy (1905-1911) and then at New Hampshire State Normal (1911-1912).

Meanwhile, he had made a rather discouraging start as a poet. From early boyhood he had been an enthusiastic reader and writer of poetry. In his teens he began to publish his poems in magazines. His poetry, however, did not seem very attractive to most readers: in 20 years he earned about $200, in all, from his verses. In 1911, at 36, he decided to sell his farm and to spend a few years in concentrated poetic work to determine once and for all whether he could succeed in literature. Attracted by the relatively low cost of living in England, he went abroad with his family in 1912 (4 children). By 1913 he managed to find a British publisher for his first book of verse “A Boy’s Will”. This, as well as his second book “North of Boston” (1914), was very favourably received by English readers and critics.

When, in 1915, Frost returned to America, he learned that his 2 books, upon republication in this country, had won appreciation of a sort to make him rub his eyes. Regardless, he resumed his old vocations of farming and teaching in New Hampshire and Vermont; but now he gave more time to composition. After 1915 he taught at various colleges and also published numerous books of verse.

Frost received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times: in 1924, 1931, 1937 and 1943. A careful study of his poetry will show that for all his appearance of rustic simplicity, Frost has more of significance to say than many of his contemporaries among whom he holds a high position.

His other volumes:

“Mountain Interval” (1916), “New Hampshire” (1923),

“West-Running Brook” (1928), “A Witness Tree” (1942),

“In the Clearing” (1962)

Frost’s poems are simple and intelligible. They have neither complex metaphorical images, nor intricate symbols. Man and nature, land and peasants – this is Frost’s world.

Robert Frost has written on almost every subject. He has illuminated things as common as a woodpile and as uncommon as a prehistoric pebble, as natural as a bird singing in its flight and as “mechanistic” as the revolt of a factory worker. But his central subject is humanity. His poetry lives with a particular aliveness because it expresses living people. Other poets have written about people. But Frost’s poems are the people: they walk, work, converse and tell their stories with the freedom of common speech. It is a language of things as well as thoughts. Although his poems do not attempt to teach anything, the city-bred reader will learn many things he may have missed knowing. Frost knows how to say a great deal in a short space, little details take on unusual meanings in his poems.

LECTURE XIII