Frost, Robert Lee (1874-1963)

US poet Robert Frost.

US poet Robert Frost.

US poet. His accessible, colloquial (written in local, informal dialect) blank verse, often flavoured with New England speech patterns, is written with an individual voice and penetrating vision. His poems include ‘Mending Wall’ (‘Something there is that does not love a wall’), ‘The Road Not Taken’, and ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’. They are collected in Complete Poems (1951).

Born in San Francisco, Frost was raised in New England, where he attended Dartmouth College and Harvard University for brief periods. After Harvard, where he failed to graduate, his varied occupations included work as a teacher, cobbler, and editor, before he settled as a farmer in New Hampshire for 11 years. In 1912 he went to England where he met English writers Rupert Brooke, Lascelles Abercrombie, Edward Thomas, along with other poets. His first book of verse, A Boy's Will, was published the following year. In 1915 Frost returned to the USA and held various university posts; he was professor of poetry at Harvard 1936. Other works include North of Boston (1914), New Hampshire (1924; Pulitzer Prize), Collected Poems (1930; Pulitzer Prize), A Further Range (1936; Pulitzer Prize), and A Witness Tree (1942; Pulitzer Prize). In 1961 he read his ‘The Gift Outright’ at the inauguration of US president, John F Kennedy.