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Robert Frost Biography

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Who is Robert Frost ?

Robert Lee Frost was an American poet, possibly the most well-known of the twentieth century's American poets. Frost grew up in an era when modernism was the dominant literary movement in both America and Europe. Frost, on the other hand, was a resolutely anti-modern poet, unlike his contemporaries. He used the same literary tropes that have been used in English from the beginning of poetry: rhyme, metre, and regimented stanzas, dismissing free verse with the witty remark, "I'd just as well play tennis with the net down."

Traditional poetic forms were widely abandoned as outmoded in modernist poetry. Frost eloquently established that they weren't by writing poems with a clearly modern sensibility and old poetic patterns. As a result, Frost has had as much, if not more, effect on modern poetry—which has experienced a revival of formalism—than many poets of his time.

Frost went through a lot of personal adversity, and his verse drama "A Masque of Mercy" (1947), based on Jonah's storey, presents a deeply felt, largely orthodox religious perspective, suggesting that man, with his limited outlook, must always bear with events and act mercifully, because an action that complies with God's will can lead to salvation. "Mercy is the only thing that can make injustice just," he wrote.

Frost's significance extends far beyond his creative contributions. He gave voice to American virtues, notably those of New England. 

In this article, we will get to know Robert Frost Biography or biosketch of Robert frost in brief, his life, education, family and also some of the major Robert Frost works will also be discussed.


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Information About Robert Frost in Short

When was Robert frost born?

March 26, 1874

Robert frost was born in?

San Francisco, California, US

What is Robert frost’s death date?

January 29, 1963

Who was Robert frost’s wife?

Elinor Miriam White

​​(m. 1895; died 1938)


Life History of Robert frost

Robert Frost Early Life

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco to Scottish-born Isabelle Moodie and William Prescott Frost, Jr., a descendant of a Devonshire Frost who travelled to New Hampshire in 1634. His father was a strong drinker, a gambler, and a strict disciplinarian who fought to succeed in politics for as long as his health allowed.

Frost was born and raised in California, where he remained until he was eleven years old. After his father died, he moved to eastern Massachusetts with his mother and sister to be closer to his paternal grandparents.

Robert Frost Education

In his childhood, he was a mediocre student who pursued his studies seriously and graduated from Lawrence High School as valedictorian and class poet in 1892. He also picked up on New England's unique speech patterns, reserved personality types, and regional customs. He was a member of the fraternity Theta Delta Chi. at Dartmouth College, and from 1897 to 1899, he studied philology at Harvard University but did not complete his degree. He eventually became noted for his witty rustic and personal style after owning a farm in Derry, New Hampshire.

Robert Frost Life Adult Years

Frost had six children with Elinor Miriam White, whom he married. Frost's first published poem, "My Butterfly: An Elegy," is a poem about a butterfly in March 1894 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and paid him $15. Frost made a significant decision at this time, deciding to devote his attention to poetry rather than teaching. At this time, the Frosts made another significant decision: Robert desired to relocate to Vancouver, but his wife desired to relocate to England, which was determined by a coin flip.

Frost sold his farm and relocated to the Gloucestershire village of Dymock in 1912 to pursue his dream of being a full-time poet. His first collection of poems, A Boy's Will, was published the following year. Edward Thomas (a member of the Dymock poets), T.E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound, the first American to write a (favourable) review of Frost's poetry, were among the important contacts he made in England. In 1915, Frost moved to America, purchased a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire, and began a career as a writer, teacher, and lecturer. He was a professor of English at Amherst College from 1916 to 1938, where he pushed his writing students to use the human voice in their work.

He spoke his poem "The Gift Outright" at President John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961 and went on to represent the United States on other official missions. He was also recognized for poetry like "Death of the Hired Man," which featured a mix of voices. "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Mending Wall," "Nothing Gold Can Stay," "Birches," "After Apple-Picking," "The Pasture," "Fire and Ice," "The Road Not Taken," and "Directive" are among the other well-known poems. His flinty literary persona and pastoral depictions of apple trees and stone walls typified the modern picture of rural New England.

Write About Robert Frost’s Personal Life

Frost was beset by sadness and loss in his personal life. Frost's father died of TB when he was 11 years old, leaving the family with only $8. In 1900, Frost's mother died of cancer. Jeanie, Frost's younger sister, was sent to a mental institution in 1920, where she died nine years later. Frost's mother and father both suffered from depression, and his daughter Irma was committed to a mental institution in 1947, indicating that mental illness ran in his family. Frost's wife, Elinor, suffered from depression as well.

Elinor and Robert Frost had six children: Elliot (1896-1904, died of cholera), Lesley Frost Ballantine (1899-1983), Carol (1902-1940, committed suicide), Irma (1903-? ), Marjorie (1905-1934, died of puerperal fever after childbirth), and Elinor Bettina (died three days after birth in 1907). Lesley and Irma were the only children that outlived their father. Frost's wife, who had always had heart difficulties, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1937 and died of heart failure in 1938.

Many commentators have noted a dark and dismal tone in some of Frost's poems, with notes of despair, solitude, and perseverance in the face of adversity implying the poet's psychological suffering.

He spent his final years in Ripton, Vermont, where he attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at Middlebury College. Robert Frost was interred at the Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont, after his death on January 29, 1963.


Robert Frost Works

Frost has always been a tough figure in American poetry to categorise. His life encompasses the entirety of the Modern Era. Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams were among his contemporaries, although he lacked their radicalism. Frost wrote in exact rhyme and measure from his first collection of poems to the end of his career.

His dedication to form at a time when most poets were shifting to free verse or experimentalism made him one of the most accessible poets of his period, and his continued appeal is likely due to this. Frost's formalism can be mistaken for simplicity or anachronism.

Frost is sometimes depicted as an elderly guy on a porch, whittling some woodwork and possibly smoking a corncob pipe, who leans over from his rocking chair as passers-by and advises them to take the way less travelled. He's been dismissed as "just a wise old man who writes in rhymes" on numerous occasions. In private life, however, Frost was a guy who stood in stark contrast to the image of a wise old farmer that had made him so popular, and he was not willing to just repeat empty logic. 

Much of the wisdom Frost gained organically—"sticking to his boots like burrs," as one of his favourite phrases puts it—could have come from rural living and appear to be good old-fashioned common sense. Frost, on the other hand, was a meticulous artist who never took anything at face value; he would never stoop to being a school-boy poet (like to the staid, pedagogical poets of the Victorian age, whom he hated), producing poetry that simply preached truisms without any ring of reality.

Frost's profound ruminations about the means of composing a poem are particularly evident in his writing. His biggest contribution to poetry is his development of the "sentence-sound" and its relationship to theories of poetic tone put out in Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading, among other places. Frost defined the sentence sound as the tonal sound of a sentence that was distinct from the sound or meaning of its words. He compared it to listening to a conversation via a closed-door: the words are muffled, but a hazy sense of meaning can still be discerned from the tone of the phrases. For instance:

"Once upon a time, and a very good time it was…" or,

"Those old fools never knew what hit them," or,

"And that has made all the difference."

This technique is evident in Frost's greatest poems, as everyday tones and colloquial idioms emerge from the rigorous meter's gridwork. Most other modern poets (and, for that matter, most poets during the twentieth century) have abandoned metres, believing that it will ultimately lead the poet to write in a stiff, outmoded tone. Frost, on the other hand, proves his slogan, "Poetry is the regeneration of words forever and ever," by reinvigorating ancient poetic forms with new sentence sounds of American speech. Take these words from his renowned poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" as an example:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

The final sentence's weary, the sing-song tone is reinforced by the repetition of the last line. Despite its rigid metre and evident rhyme, the poem seems remarkably conversational. Consider the closing quatrain of his creepy lyric poem "The Most of It," where the last word shocks the reader like a whoosh of chilly air in its total ordinariness:

…Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,

And landed pouring like a waterfall,

And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread

And forced the underbrush, and that was all.

Frost is capable of writing poems that sound astonishingly conversational to the ear, yet being blatantly poetic and rhymed. Frost's numerous dialogue poems, which, in contrast to his more recognised nature poems, tend to take the shape of convoluted philosophical debates conducted across various voices, are another example of his continual tinkering with the position of American speech in formal poetry (a concern remarkably similar to that of his contemporary William Carlos Williams). Frost's poetry has a very modern effect, and his best poems owe as much to the twentieth-century New England in which he lived and wrote as they do to the centuries of metrical poets he revered in his obedience to forms.


Legacy

In twentieth-century literature, Robert Frost occupied an unusual position, combining parts of the modernist temperament with traditional poetry forms. His writing is influenced by the pastoral works of Thomas Hardy and William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson's introspection and familiar imagery, and the self-reliance and feeling of location found in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Frost's sarcasm and ambiguity, scepticism, and honesty, on the other hand, show a decidedly modern sensibility.

In 1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943, Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times. Frost was also the Library of Congress's Poetry Consultant from 1958 to 1959, a position that was renamed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, or simply Poet Laureate, in 1986.

Frost was the first person to receive two honorary degrees from Dartmouth College and got honorary degrees from Harvard University, Bates College, Oxford, and Cambridge universities. During his lifetime, Robert Frost Middle School in Fairfax, Virginia, and Amherst College's main library were both named after him. In 1971, Rockville, Maryland's Robert Frost Middle School was named after him.

FAQs on Robert Frost Biography

1. What Was Robert Frost’s Last Poem?

Ans) Frost died of complications after prostate surgery on January 29, 1963, in Boston. He was laid to rest in Bennington, Vermont's Old Bennington Cemetery. "I had a lover's dispute with the universe," his gravestone says, quoting the last line of his poem "The Lesson for Today" (1942).

2. What is the Main Theme of Robert Frost Poetry?

Ans) The dismal state of man in his life is the central theme of his poems. The reader will find wrapped in the poem a depth and level of human feeling that is not easily perceived by the eye but rather felt and fostered in the heart, throughout all of Frost's writings.

3. Why Does Robert Frost Use Nature?

Ans) Frost primarily employs nature as a metaphor in his poetry to illustrate the poems' goals. He often begins a poem with an observation of anything in nature and then progresses towards a connection to some human predicament, using nature as a backdrop metaphor.