Robert Frost

The great poet of New England was born in San Francisco and did not see New England until he was 11. His father edited a San Francisco paper, ran for city tax collector and lost, and died of tuberculosis in May 1885, leaving the family eight dollars. They went east to Lawrence, Massachusetts, to live under a grandfather who was an overseer at a mill. Frost graduated from Lawrence High in 1892 as co-valedictorian alongside Elinor White, whom he married three years later. He lasted two months at Dartmouth. He delivered newspapers, tended carbon arc lamps in a factory, and helped his mother manage a class of boys she could not control. In 1894 The Independent paid him 15 dollars for a poem, which he took as permission to propose.

His grandfather bought him a farm at Derry, New Hampshire, and Frost worked it nine years and wrote before dawn. Most of his first two books came out of that failure. He quit it for schoolteaching, then in 1912 sailed for England, where publishers took A Boy's Will in 1913 and North of Boston in 1914 and Ezra Pound reviewed him first. He came home in 1915 already made. Four Pulitzer Prizes followed — New Hampshire, Collected Poems, A Further Range, A Witness Tree — and no other poet has four. He taught at Amherst and Michigan and spent 40 summers at Bread Loaf. On January 20, 1961, glare off the snow beat his eyes and he could not read the poem written for John F. Kennedy, so he set the page down and said The Gift Outright from memory.

Count the deaths against the pastoral. His father went of tuberculosis when he was 11. His mother died of cancer in 1900, the year his first son Elliott died at four on the Derry farm. He had his younger sister Jeanie committed to a mental hospital in 1920 and she died there nine years later. His daughter Irma was committed in 1947. He and his mother both suffered from depression, and so did his wife Elinor, who died in 1938. The verse that made him a national possession, the wall and the woods and the road in the yellow wood, got read for half a century as reassurance, which is not what he had put into it. Randall Jarrell spent the 1950s pointing at the other Frost, the one who was frightened.

He died in Boston on January 29, 1963, at 88, and lies in the old cemetery at Bennington, Vermont, under a line from The Lesson for Today: I had a lover's quarrel with the world. The quarrel outlived him. In 1977 the third volume of Lawrance Thompson's authorized biography presented a man far nastier than anyone had supposed, and the homespun public figure did not survive it. What came back, through William Pritchard, Harold Bloom and the younger poet Joseph Brodsky, was the darker writer Jarrell had described. The critic Charles McGrath summarized the whole arc in 2003: a New England folkie at his death, a bleak and unforgiving modernist by the end of the century.

Robert Frost's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A Boy's Will book
  His first collection, published in London 1913
• North of Boston book
  Contains Mending Wall and Home Burial 1914
• New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes book
  Brought him the first of four Pulitzer Prizes 1923
• Collected Poems book
  His second Pulitzer 1930
• The Figure a Poem Makes article
  The essay on poetics: no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader 1939
• A Witness Tree book
  His fourth Pulitzer, and the volume that collected The Gift Outright 1942

• March 26, 1874 aged 0 Born in San Francisco
• May 5, 1885 aged 11 His father dies of tuberculosis, leaving the family eight dollars They moved east to Lawrence, Massachusetts, under his grandfather's patronage.
• November 8, 1894 aged 20 The Independent publishes My Butterfly and pays him 15 dollars
• December 19, 1895 aged 21 Marries Elinor Miriam White at Lawrence, Massachusetts
• 1900 aged ~26 His son Elliott dies at four and his mother dies of cancer The family took up the Derry farm the same year.
• 1912 aged ~38 Sails for England and settles at Beaconsfield A Boy's Will followed in 1913, North of Boston in 1914.
• 1923 aged ~49 New Hampshire brings the first of four Pulitzer Prizes
• January 20, 1961 aged 86 Recites The Gift Outright at John F. Kennedy's inauguration Glare off the snow stopped him reading Dedication, the new poem he had written for the day.
• January 29, 1963 aged 88 Dies in Boston at 88

• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. read at his inauguration
• Maya Angelou 1928–2014
  Poet and memoirist whose I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings broke new ground in autobiographical writing. the next poet at an inauguration
• Emily Dickinson 1830–1886
  Reclusive poet whose innovative use of form and slant rhyme made her one of America's greatest literary voices. the other New England
• Walt Whitman 1819–1892
  Poet whose Leaves of Grass celebrated democracy, nature, and the human body in free verse. the American line he wrote against
• Langston Hughes 1901–1967
  Harlem Renaissance poet and writer whose work celebrated Black life and challenged racial injustice. contemporary in another America
• Sylvia Plath 1932–1963
  Poet and novelist whose confessional works, including The Bell Jar, broke new ground for women's writing. inherited the region