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Robert
Frost (1874 -1963 ), whom most Americans considered the voice
of rural New England, was actually born in San Francisco and lived as a
child in the industrial city of Lawrence, Massachusetts. He
attended Dartmouth College for a few months but left to write poetry and
work in a cotton mill. Years later, after he had become a
husband and father, Frost returned to college but left after two years,
again to write seriously. In
1912, Frost moved his young family to England. During the three
years he spent there, he wrote and published two books of poems - A
Boy's Will, (1912), and North of Boston (1914) - which
were immediate successes on both sides of the Atlantic. Frost
went home to New England in 1915, finally able to make his living as a
poet. During his long career, he won four Pulitzer Prizes and
often gave public readings and lectures. One of his last public
appearances was at the 1961 inauguration of President John F. Kennedy,
where he recited his poem "The Gift Outright". |
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Like
the independent New England farmer he frequently wrote about, Frost went
his own way. he refused to join his contemporaries in their
experimental search for new poetic forms, finding all the freedom he
needed within the bounds of traditional verse. Despite their
apparently home-spun subjects and traditional form, Frost's poems are
only seemingly simple. Beneath their surface is a complex, often
dark view of human life and personalities. Frost said: "Like a
piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own
melting...read it a hundred times; it will forever keep its freshness as
a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a
meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went."
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