Robert (Lee) Frost (1874-1963)

Robert Frost born in San Francisco Mar. 26, 1874, was one of America's leading 20th-century poets .He was four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. An essentially pastoral poet often associated with rural New England, Frost wrote poems whose philosophical dimensions transcend any region. Although his verse forms are traditional--he often said, in a dig at archrival Carl Sandburg, that he would as soon play tennis without a net as write free verse--he was a pioneer in the interplay of rhythm and meter and in the poetic use of the vocabulary and inflections of everyday speech. His poetry is thus both traditional and experimental, regional and universal.



After his father's death in 1885, when young Frost was 11, the family left California and settled in Massachusetts. Frost attended high school in that state, entered Dartmouth College, but remained less than one semester. Returning to Massachusetts, he taught school and worked in a mill and as a newspaper reporter. In 1894 he sold "My Butterfly: An Elegy" to The Independent, a New York literary journal. A year later he married Eli nor White, with whom he had shared valedictorian honors at Lawrence (Mass.) High School. From 1897 to 1899 he attended Harvard College as a special student but left without a degree. Over the next ten years he wrote poems, operated a farm in Derry, New Hampshire and supplemented his income by teaching at Derry's Pinkerton Academy.


In 1912, at the age of 38, he sold the farm and used the proceeds to take his family to England, where he could devote himself entirely to writing. His efforts to establish himself and his work were almost immediately successful. A Boy's Will was accepted by a London publisher and brought out in 1913, followed a year later by North of Boston. Favorable reviews on both sides of the Atlantic resulted in American publication of the books by Henry Holt and Company, Frost's primary American publisher, and in the establishing of Frost's transatlantic reputation.
He passed away on january 29,1963.
some lines from his famous My November Guest
My Sorrow, when she's here with me,



Thinks these dark days of autumn rain


Are beautiful as days can be;


She loves the bare, the withered tree;


She walks the sodden pasture lane.






Her pleasure will not let me stay.


She talks and I am fain to list:


She's glad the birds are gone away,


She's glad her simple worsted grady


Is silver now with clinging mist.

His famous quation :

''The kind of Unitarian


Who having by elimination got

From many gods to Three, and Three to One,

Thinks why not taper off to none at all.''