Robert Frost and His Tragic Life

“Robert Frost, four time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was the most widely read poet of the 20th century. Poetry often associated with New England, his work was philosophically universal.”

Robert Frost (1874 – 1963) was born in San Francisco, California. His father William Prescott Frost, journalist died of tuberculosis when Robert Frost was about eleven years old. His mother, Isabelle Moody, was a school teacher. She provided his education for about the first ten years of his life. He didn’t like to go to school, because he was struck with nervous stomach pains.

When Frost’s father died in 1884, his will requested that he be buried in New England. So his wife and two children, Robert and Jeanie, went east for the funeral. They settled in Salem, Massachusetts, where his grandfather lived and offered them a home.

He started high school in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where he began to write and he published his first poem. After high school he attended Dartmouth College however he left and started to work as a reporter for the Lawrence Daily American. Frost moved from job to job, working in mills, as a reporter for newspaper, teaching and writing poetry.

He became engaged to Elinor White, his classmate and in 1895 Frost married her; they had six children. He tried to make a career of teaching. He helped his mother with a small private school in Lawrence.

He spent two years at Harvard, but didn’t graduate, because he had difficult time raising his family. The Frost’s settled in Methuen, near Lawrence, where Robert began raising chickens in accordance with the advice of a doctor to find a more outdoor, active occupation. In 1900 he was diagnosed with possible tuberculosis, so he moved his poultry business to Derry, New Hampshire.

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...pired to find truth in ordinary things and tell the truth in an eloquent but reserved way. He valued courage and commitment. He wrote,...”The utmost reward of daring should be still to dare.”

Frost received many honors and awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943; he was elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1916, and to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1930. On the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday the U.S. Senate adopted a resolution extending him felicitations. In 1955 Vermont named a mountain after him in the town of his legal residence, Ripton. More than thirty colleges and universities gave him honorary degrees, and in the spring of 1957 he returned to Great Britain to receive honorary degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, and the National University of Ireland.