Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, but his family

moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1884 following

his father’s death. The move was actually a return, for
Frost’s ancestors were originally New Englanders, and
Frost became famous for his poetry’s engagement with
New England locales, identities, and themes. Frost
graduated from Lawrence High School, in 1892, as
class poet (he also shared the honor of co-valedictorian
with his wife-to-be Elinor White), and two years later,
the New York Independent accepted his poem entitled
“My Butterfly,” launching his status as a professional
poet with a check for $15.00. Frost's first book was
published around the age of 40, but he would go on to
win a record four Pulitzer Prizes and become the most
famous poet of his time, before his death at the age of
88.

To celebrate his first publication, Frost had a book of

six poems privately printed; two copies
of Twilight were made—one for himself and one for his
fiancee. Over the next eight years, however, he
succeeded in having only 13 more poems published.
During this time, Frost sporadically attended
Dartmouth and Harvard and earned a living teaching
school and, later, working a farm in Derry, New
Hampshire. But in 1912, discouraged by American
magazines’ constant rejection of his work, he took his
family to England, where he found more professional
success. Continuing to write about New England, he
had two books published, A Boy’s Will (1913)
and North of Boston (1914), which established his
reputation so that his return to the United States in
1915 was as a celebrated literary figure. Holt put out
an American edition of North of Boston in 1915, and
periodicals that had once scorned his work now sought
it.

Frost’s position in American letters was cemented with

the publication of North of Boston, and in the years
before his death he came to be considered the
unofficial poet laureate of the United States. On his
75th birthday, the US Senate passed a resolution in his
honor which said, “His poems have helped to guide
American thought and humor and wisdom, setting forth
to our minds a reliable representation of ourselves and
of all men.” In 1955, the State of Vermont named a
mountain after him in Ripton, the town of his legal
residence; and at the presidential inauguration of John
F. Kennedy in 1961, Frost was given the
unprecedented honor of being asked to read a poem.
Frost wrote a poem called “Dedication” for the
occasion, but could not read it given the day’s harsh
sunlight. He instead recited “The Gift Outright,” which
Kennedy had originally asked him to read, with a
revised, more forward-looking, last line.

Though Frost allied himself with no literary school or

movement, the imagists helped at the start to promote
his American reputation. Poetry: A Magazine of
Verse published his work before others began to
clamor for it. It also published a review by Ezra
Pound of the British edition of A Boy’s Will, which
Pound said “has the tang of the New Hampshire
woods, and it has just this utter sincerity. It is not post-
Miltonic or post-Swinburnian or post Kiplonian. This
man has the good sense to speak naturally and to paint
the thing, the thing as he sees it.” Amy
Lowell reviewed North of Boston in the New
Republic, and she, too, sang Frost’s praises: “He writes
in classic metres in a way to set the teeth of all the
poets of the older schools on edge; and he writes in
classic metres, and uses inversions and cliches
whenever he pleases, those devices so abhorred by the
newest generation. He goes his own way, regardless of
anyone else’s rules, and the result is a book of unusual
power and sincerity.” In these first two volumes, Frost
introduced not only his affection for New England
themes and his unique blend of traditional meters and
colloquialism, but also his use of dramatic monologues
and dialogues. “Mending Wall,” the leading poem
in North of Boston, describes the friendly argument
between the speaker and his neighbor as they walk
along their common wall replacing fallen stones; their
differing attitudes toward “boundaries” offer symbolic
significance typical of the poems in these early
collections.

Mountain Interval marked Frost’s turn to another kind

of poem, a brief meditation sparked by an object,
person or event. Like the monologues and dialogues,
these short pieces have a dramatic quality. “Birches,”
discussed above, is an example, as is “The Road Not
Taken,” in which a fork in a woodland path transcends
the specific. The distinction of this volume, the Boston
Transcript said, “is that Mr. Frost takes the lyricism
of A Boy’s Will and plays a deeper music and gives a
more intricate variety of experience.”

Several new qualities emerged in Frost’s work with the

appearance of New Hampshire (1923), particularly a
new self-consciousness and willingness to speak of
himself and his art. The volume, for which Frost won
his first Pulitzer Prize, “pretends to be nothing but a
long poem with notes and grace notes,” as Louis
Untermeyer described it. The title poem, approximately
fourteen pages long, is a “rambling tribute” to Frost’s
favorite state and “is starred and dotted with scientific
numerals in the manner of the most profound treatise.”
Thus, a footnote at the end of a line of poetry will refer
the reader to another poem seemingly inserted to
merely reinforce the text of “New Hampshire.” Some of
these poems are in the form of epigrams, which appear
for the first time in Frost’s work. “Fire and Ice,” for
example, one of the better known epigrams, speculates
on the means by which the world will end. Frost’s most
famous and, according to J. McBride Dabbs, most
perfect lyric, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening,” is also included in this collection; conveying
“the insistent whisper of death at the heart of life,” the
poem portrays a speaker who stops his sleigh in the
midst of a snowy woods only to be called from the
inviting gloom by the recollection of practical duties.
Frost himself said of this poem that it is the kind he’d
like to print on one page followed with “forty pages of
footnotes.”

West-Running Brook (1928), Frost’s fifth book of

poems, is divided into six sections, one of which is
taken up entirely by the title poem. This poem refers to
a brook which perversely flows west instead of east to
the Atlantic like all other brooks. A comparison is set
up between the brook and the poem’s speaker who
trusts himself to go by “contraries”; further rebellious
elements exemplified by the brook give expression to
an eccentric individualism, Frost’s stoic theme of
resistance and self-realization. Reviewing the
collection in the New York Herald Tribune, Babette
Deutsch wrote: “The courage that is bred by a dark
sense of Fate, the tenderness that broods over
mankind in all its blindness and absurdity, the vision
that comes to rest as fully on kitchen smoke and
lapsing snow as on mountains and stars—these are his,
and in his seemingly casual poetry, he quietly makes
them ours.”

A Further Range (1936), which earned Frost another

Pulitzer Prize and was a Book-of-the-Month Club
selection, contains two groups of poems subtitled
“Taken Doubly” and “Taken Singly.” In the first, and
more interesting, of these groups, the poems are
somewhat didactic, though there are humorous and
satiric pieces as well. Included here is “Two Tramps in
Mud Time,” which opens with the story of two itinerant
lumbermen who offer to cut the speaker’s wood for
pay; the poem then develops into a sermon on the
relationship between work and play, vocation and
avocation, preaching the necessity to unite them. Of
the entire volume, William Rose Benét wrote, “It is
better worth reading than nine-tenths of the books that
will come your way this year. In a time when all kinds
of insanity are assailing the nations it is good to listen
to this quiet humor, even about a hen, a hornet, or
Square Matthew. ... And if anybody should ask me why
I still believe in my land, I have only to put this book in
his hand and answer, ‘Well-here is a man of my
country.’” Most critics acknowledge that Frost’s poetry
in the 1940s and '50s grew more and more abstract,
cryptic, and even sententious, so it is generally on the
basis of his earlier work that he is judged. His politics
and religious faith, hitherto informed by skepticism and
local color, became more and more the guiding
principles of his work. He had been, as Randall
Jarrell points out, “a very odd and very radical radical
when young” yet became “sometimes callously and
unimaginatively conservative” in his old age. He had
become a public figure, and in the years before his
death, much of his poetry was written from this
stance.

Reviewing A Witness Tree (1942) in Books, Wilbert

Snow noted a few poems “which have a right to stand
with the best things he has written”: “Come In,” “The
Silken Tent,” and “Carpe Diem” especially. Yet Snow
went on: “Some of the poems here are little more than
rhymed fancies; others lack the bullet-like unity of
structure to be found in North of Boston.” On the other
hand, Stephen Vincent Benet felt that Frost had “never
written any better poems than some of those in this
book.” Similarly, critics were let down by In the
Clearing (1962). One wrote, “Although this reviewer
considers Robert Frost to be the foremost
contemporary U.S. poet, he regretfully must state that
most of the poems in this new volume are
disappointing. ... [They] often are closer to jingles than
to the memorable poetry we associate with his name.”
Another maintained that “the bulk of the book consists
of poems of ‘philosophic talk.’ Whether you like them
or not depends mostly on whether you share the
‘philosophy.’”

Indeed, many readers do share Frost’s philosophy, and

still others who do not nevertheless continue to find
delight and significance in his large body of poetry. In
October, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a
speech at the dedication of the Robert Frost Library in
Amherst, Massachusetts. “In honoring Robert Frost,”
the President said, “we therefore can pay honor to the
deepest source of our national strength. That strength
takes many forms and the most obvious forms are not
always the most significant. ... Our national strength
matters; but the spirit which informs and controls our
strength matters just as much. This was the special
significance of Robert Frost.” The poet would probably
have been pleased by such recognition, for he had said
once, in an interview with Harvey Breit: “One thing I
care about, and wish young people could care about, is
taking poetry as the first form of understanding. If
poetry isn’t understanding all, the whole world, then it
isn’t worth anything.”

Frost’s poetry is revered to this day. When a previously

unknown poem by Frost titled “War Thoughts at
Home,” was discovered and dated to 1918, it was
subsequently published in the Fall 2006 issue of
the Virginia Quarterly Review. The first edition
Frost’s Notebooks were published in 2009, and
thousands of errors were corrected in the paperback
edition years later. A critical edition of his Collected
Prose was published in 2010 to broad critical acclaim.
A multi-volume series of his Collected Letters is now in
production, with the first volume appearing in 2014
and the second in 2016.

Robert Frost continues to hold a unique and almost

isolated position in American letters. “Though his
career fully spans the modern period and though it is
impossible to speak of him as anything other than a
modern poet,” writes James M. Cox, “it is difficult to
place him in the main tradition of modern poetry.” In a
sense, Frost stands at the crossroads of 19th-century
American poetry and modernism, for in his verse may
be found the culmination of many 19th-century
tendencies and traditions as well as parallels to the
works of his 20th-century contemporaries. Taking his
symbols from the public domain, Frost developed, as
many critics note, an original, modern idiom and a
sense of directness and economy that reflect the
imagism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. On the other
hand, as Leonard Unger and William Van O’Connor
point out in Poems for Study, “Frost’s poetry, unlike
that of such contemporaries as Eliot, Stevens, and the
later Yeats, shows no marked departure from the
poetic practices of the nineteenth century.” Although
he avoids traditional verse forms and only uses rhyme
erratically, Frost is not an innovator and his technique
is never experimental.

Frost’s theory of poetic composition ties him to both

centuries. Like the 19th-century Romantic poets, he
maintained that a poem is “never a put-up job. ... It
begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a
homesickness, a loneliness. It is never a thought to
begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing
vagueness.” Yet, “working out his own version of the
‘impersonal’ view of art,” as Hyatt H. Waggoner
observed, Frost also upheld T.S. Eliot’s idea that the
man who suffers and the artist who creates are totally
separate. In a 1932 letter to Sydney Cox, Frost
explained his conception of poetry: “The objective idea
is all I ever cared about. Most of my ideas occur in
verse. ... To be too subjective with what an artist has
managed to make objective is to come on him
presumptuously and render ungraceful what he in pain
of his life had faith he had made graceful.”

To accomplish such objectivity and grace, Frost took

up 19th-century tools and made them new. Lawrance
Thompson has explained that, according to Frost, “the
self-imposed restrictions of meter in form and of
coherence in content” work to a poet’s advantage; they
liberate him from the experimentalist’s burden—the
perpetual search for new forms and alternative
structures. Thus Frost, as he himself put it in “The
Constant Symbol,” wrote his verse regular; he never
completely abandoned conventional metrical forms for
free verse, as so many of his contemporaries were
doing. At the same time, his adherence to meter, line
length, and rhyme scheme was not an arbitrary choice.
He maintained that “the freshness of a poem belongs
absolutely to its not having been thought out and then
set to verse as the verse in turn might be set to music.”
He believed, rather, that the poem’s particular mood
dictated or determined the poet’s “first commitment to
metre and length of line.”

Critics frequently point out that Frost complicated his

problem and enriched his style by setting traditional
meters against the natural rhythms of speech. Drawing
his language primarily from the vernacular, he avoided
artificial poetic diction by employing the accent of a
soft-spoken New Englander. In The Function of
Criticism, Yvor Winters faulted Frost for his “endeavor
to make his style approximate as closely as possible the
style of conversation.” But what Frost achieved in his
poetry was much more complex than a mere imitation
of the New England farmer idiom. He wanted to
restore to literature the “sentence sounds that underlie
the words,” the “vocal gesture” that enhances
meaning. That is, he felt the poet’s ear must be
sensitive to the voice in order to capture with the
written word the significance of sound in the spoken
word. “The Death of the Hired Man,” for instance,
consists almost entirely of dialogue between Mary and
Warren, her farmer-husband, but critics have observed
that in this poem Frost takes the prosaic patterns of
their speech and makes them lyrical. To Ezra Pound
“The Death of the Hired Man” represented Frost at his
best—when he “dared to write ... in the natural speech
of New England; in natural spoken speech, which is
very different from the ‘natural’ speech of the
newspapers, and of many professors.”

Frost’s use of New England dialect is only one aspect

of his often discussed regionalism. Within New
England, his particular focus was on New Hampshire,
which he called “one of the two best states in the
Union,” the other being Vermont. In an essay entitled
“Robert Frost and New England: A Revaluation,” W.G.
O’Donnell noted how from the start, in A Boy’s
Will, “Frost had already decided to give his writing a
local habitation and a New England name, to root his
art in the soil that he had worked with his own hands.”
Reviewing North of Boston in the New Republic, Amy
Lowell wrote, “Not only is his work New England in
subject, it is so in technique. ... Mr. Frost has
reproduced both people and scenery with a vividness
which is extraordinary.” Many other critics have
lauded Frost’s ability to realistically evoke the New
England landscape; they point out that one can
visualize an orchard in “After Apple-Picking” or
imagine spring in a farmyard in “Two Tramps in Mud
Time.” In this “ability to portray the local truth in
nature,” O’Donnell claims, Frost has no peer. The same
ability prompted Pound to declare, “I know more of
farm life than I did before I had read his poems. That
means I know more of ‘Life.’”

Frost’s regionalism, critics remark, is in his realism,

not in politics; he creates no picture of regional unity
or sense of community. In The Continuity of American
Poetry, Roy Harvey Pearce describes Frost’s
protagonists as individuals who are constantly forced
to confront their individualism as such and to reject the
modern world in order to retain their identity. Frost’s
use of nature is not only similar but closely tied to this
regionalism. He stays as clear of religion and
mysticism as he does of politics. What he finds in
nature is sensuous pleasure; he is also sensitive to the
earth’s fertility and to man’s relationship to the soil. To
critic M.L. Rosenthal, Frost’s pastoral quality, his
“lyrical and realistic repossession of the rural and
‘natural,’” is the staple of his reputation.

Yet, just as Frost is aware of the distances between one

man and another, so he is also always aware of the
distinction, the ultimate separateness, of nature and
man. Marion Montgomery has explained, “His attitude
toward nature is one of armed and amicable truce and
mutual respect interspersed with crossings of the
boundaries” between individual man and natural
forces. Below the surface of Frost’s poems are dreadful
implications, what Rosenthal calls his “shocked sense
of the helpless cruelty of things.” This natural cruelty is
at work in “Design” and in “Once by the Pacific.” The
ominous tone of these two poems prompted
Rosenthal’s further comment: “At his most powerful
Frost is as staggered by ‘the horror’ as Eliot and
approaches the hysterical edge of sensibility in a
comparable way. ... His is still the modern mind in
search of its own meaning.”

The austere and tragic view of life that emerges in so

many of Frost’s poems is modulated by his
metaphysical use of detail. As Frost portrays him, man
might be alone in an ultimately indifferent universe,
but he may nevertheless look to the natural world for
metaphors of his own condition. Thus, in his search for
meaning in the modern world, Frost focuses on those
moments when the seen and the unseen, the tangible
and the spiritual intersect. John T. Napier calls this
Frost’s ability “to find the ordinary a matrix for the
extraordinary.” In this respect, he is often compared
with Emily Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, in
whose poetry, too, a simple fact, object, person, or
event will be transfigured and take on greater mystery
or significance. The poem “Birches” is an example: it
contains the image of slender trees bent to the ground
temporarily by a boy’s swinging on them or
permanently by an ice-storm. But as the poem unfolds,
it becomes clear that the speaker is concerned not only
with child’s play and natural phenomena, but also with
the point at which physical and spiritual reality merge.
Such symbolic import of mundane facts informs many
of Frost’s poems, and in “Education by Poetry” he
explained: “Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty
metaphors, ‘grace’ metaphors, and goes on to the
profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the
one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning
another. ... Unless you are at home in the metaphor,
unless you have had your proper poetical education in
the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.”