No matter where you went to school, chances are that you studied a poem by Robert Frost.
Indeed, his legacy is unprecedented in American literature, and is sure to be revered for many generations to come. But the path to greatness was not to be any easy one.
“A poem begins as a lump in the throat.”
Though Frost’s work focused on rural life, he actually grew up in the city of San Francisco with his father (an alcoholic), his mother (who suffered from depression), and his sister, who was two years his junior.
When Frost was 11, his father died of tuberculosis, the first of many losses he would experience in his lifetime. Suddenly poor (they had $8 to their name), the family picked up and relocated to Lawrence, Massachusetts in order to move in with Frost’s grandparents.
There, he attended Lawrence High School, where he met his future wife, Elinor Miriam White, with whom he was co-valedictorian upon graduation in 1892. Afterwards, he attended the prestigious Dartmouth College, but dropped out after a semester. Frost spent the next year working uninspiring jobs such as delivering newspapers and making lamps in a local factory, all the time knowing that his true calling was in poetry.
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.”
In 1894, Frost sold his first poem: My Butterfly. An Elegy. It was published in the New York Independent, and he was paid a total of $15 (around $400 in today’s economy). Frost was ecstatic. He celebrated by proposing to Elinor, but she declined, wishing to complete her tertiary education.
Frost – who it was later uncovered suffered from depression – took the rejection hard. He travelled to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia where, he later told a biographer, he planned to “throw (his) life away”.
What happened that night in the swamp remains a mystery, but when Frost returned to civilisation the following morning, he was a new man: focused, determined, strong. A group of duck hunters took him to town, and he eventually made his way home, where he proposed to Elinor once more. She said yes. Their first son, Elliot, was born the following year.
After two years at Harvard (reports differ on why he left), and the death of his mother in 1900, Frost’s grandfather purchased him a farm in New Hampshire – the location where he would compose many of his most popular poems. As famous as his work would later become, it was originally met with indifference by publishers. Over this period, Frost only managed to sell two poems.
Many thought his work was too traditional, bleak, and down-to-earth for the Modernist era, all aspects of his craft that would highlight his greatness much later into the century.
It wasn’t only his failure to get published that pushed Frost to the edge during this time. Elliot died in 1904 due to cholera. Frost’s youngest child, Elinor, then died three days after her birth in 1907. Then, finally, after nine unsuccessful years, the family retired from farming. For a time, Frost taught at the New Hampshire Normal School, but by 1911, he’d made up his mind:
It was time for a change.
“Freedom lies in being bold.”
Frost and his family – wife Elinor, son Carol, and daughters Lesley, Irma, and Marjorie – set sail for England in 1912 with hopes that they would find a publisher willing to support new poets.
Establishing themselves in the small town of Beaconsfield, Frost soon became acquainted with important individuals including Edward Thomas (who would go on to inspire what is probably Frost’s most famous poem, The Road Not Taken), T.E. Hulme, and, most notably, American critic and poet Ezra Pound, who would be the first of his countrymen to write a favourable review of his work.
“(Frost’s poetry) has the tang of the New Hampshire woods, and it has just this utter sincerity,” declared Pound in one of the critiques that would see Frost’s work start to receive the attention it deserved.
It wasn’t long before Frost’s first two collection of poems were published: A Boy’s Will in 1913, and North of Boston in 1914. His writing was well received due to its colloquial language which he described as “the sound of sense”.
“Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that made all the difference.”
It would take two more years before A Boy’s Will was published in the US, around the same time that Frost decided to return to farm-life in New Hampshire. The homestead they purchased would become the family’s summer home, before being transformed into The Frost Place, a museum that doubled as site for poetry conferences.
With word finally spreading about Frost’s talent, he had, at last, managed to find stability. Intermittently, over the next 22 years, he lectured in English at Amherst College in Massachusetts, while also teaching every summer and fall at the Bread Loaf School of English of Middlebury College, a position he would hold for the rest of his life.
The pinnacle of Frost’s career came in 1924, when he won his first Pulitzer Prize for his book New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes. It was the first of four Pulitzers he would be awarded with during his career, being followed up by Collected Poems in 1931, 1937’s A Further Range, and A Witness Tree in 1943.
Still, life was not easy. Frost lost four more members of his family over barely a decade. His sister, Jeanie, had been committed to a mental hospital in 1920, and died nine years later. Daughter Marjorie died in 1934 after childbirth. Wife Elinor died in 1938 after a year-long battle with breast cancer. Finally, his son Carol committed suicide in 1940.
Then, not long after, Irma was institutionalised with mental issues.
“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”
Frost spent the majority of the rest of his life living in Miami. During this time, he received over 40 honorary degrees for universities including Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge.
In 1960, he was awarded a United States Congressional Gold Medal “in recognition of his poetry, which has enriched the culture of the United States and the philosophy of the world”.
The award was finally bestowed upon him in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy, whose inauguration at which Frost had recited one of his poems, The Gift Outright.
Robert Frost died in 1963, following complications from prostate surgery.
Today, he has remembered as not just a great man and writer but an artistic institution unto himself. His distinctive style, his honest words, are the pinnacle of the form, and are bound to remain a cornerstone of poetic history for a long time to come.