About the Author

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874, but following the death of his father, the future poet, aged 11, moved with his mother and family to New England to be closer to relatives. After only a short period with her kin, the family moved to Salem, New Hampshire, where his mother accepted a teaching position. Robert attended Lawrence High School in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where he graduated as a co-valedictorian along with Elinor White, whom he married three years later. With the help of his grandfather, he attended Harvard for two years between 1897 and 1899, and with the same assistance, he purchased a farm in Derry, New Hampshire. With his young family of four children, Robert found it necessary financially to teach as well as to attend the farm. For eleven years, he taught at the Pinkerton Academy in Derry.

Robert Frost had already begun writing serious poetry early in his young married life, but publishers ignored his work, for the most part. With Elinor and his family, he sold the farm in 1912 and moved to England, hoping to launch his literary career from within a community of writers, drawing on the inspiration they might stimulate together. His gamble was successful. In only a year, Frost published his first work, A Boy's Will, and a year later the classic North of Boston. His strategy for seeking initial acceptance and acclaim abroad had worked, and Robert Frost found both books published in the United States within a year. His goal accomplished, the poet and his family returned home to New Hampshire.

Frost's recognitions both at home and in England brought him wide visibility in academe, and he accepted lectureships and residencies at Amherst College, Michigan, Wesleyan, Dartmouth, Yale, Harvard, and Middlebury College. Despite the whirlwind of readings and lectureships, Robert Frost continued to find time to write. In 1923 he published Selected Poems and New Hampshire, a work that won him the first of three Pulitzer Prizes. Other works so recognized include Collected Poems (1930) and A Further Range (1936). The 1940's were just as prolific, with the publication of A Witness Tree (1942), Steeple Bush (1947), A Mask of Reason (1945) and A Mask of Mercy (1947).

Robert Frost's poetry might best be characterized as "descriptive realism," addressing universal motifs found in ordinary surroundings and in simple relationships. Rather than teach, Frost sought, through each poem to create an experience that "begins in delight and ends in wisdom," a communication that "makes you remember what you didn't know you knew." His celebration of a "responsible individualism," rooted in innate principles, bridges his twentieth-century work with his complementary New Englanders a century earlier in Concord, Massachusetts.