Robert Frost

Based on Wikipedia: Robert Frost

The Poet Who Made Simplicity Terrifying

Robert Frost wrote poems that seemed simple enough for a child to memorize. A man stops by woods on a snowy evening. Two roads diverge in a yellow wood. A farmer mends a stone wall with his neighbor. These images have become so embedded in American culture that we recite them without thinking, the way we might hum a melody without remembering where we first heard it.

But here's what most people miss: Frost was not a comforting poet. He was a frightened man writing about a terrifying universe, and he disguised his darkest insights in the rhythms of country speech.

The literary critic Randall Jarrell saw through the disguise. He argued that behind the "genial, homespun New England rustic" stood a different Frost entirely—one who was "desperate, frightened, and brave." This darker Frost has become the one scholars now recognize, and the poems Jarrell championed as masterworks have found their way into every major anthology.

A California Boy in New England's Clothing

Frost wasn't born in New England. He was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874, to a journalist father and a Scottish immigrant mother. The family lived in California until Frost was eleven years old, when his father died of tuberculosis and left them with exactly eight dollars.

Eight dollars. That was the inheritance.

His mother moved the family across the country to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where Robert's paternal grandfather worked as an overseer at a New England mill. This relocation would prove fateful. The boy who had grown up in a city would eventually become synonymous with rural New England—its stone walls, its birch trees, its apple orchards, its taciturn farmers.

Frost graduated from Lawrence High School in 1892 as co-valedictorian alongside the young woman who would become his wife, Elinor White. He published his first poem in the high school magazine. The arc of his life seemed set.

Except it wasn't. Frost tried Dartmouth College and lasted two months. He tried Harvard and left after two years, voluntarily, due to illness. He delivered newspapers, worked in a factory maintaining carbon arc lamps, helped his mother teach a class of unruly boys. He hated all of it.

"I felt that my true calling was to write poetry," he later said.

The Long Apprenticeship

In 1894, Frost sold his first poem to a New York publication called The Independent. The poem was "My Butterfly. An Elegy." He received fifteen dollars for it—about five hundred and forty-five dollars in today's money. Proud and hopeful, he proposed marriage to Elinor.

She said no. Or rather, she said not yet. She wanted to finish college first.

Frost didn't take rejection well. He went on an excursion to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia—a name that perfectly captures his state of mind—and when he returned, he asked again. This time Elinor had graduated. This time she said yes. They married in December 1895.

What followed was nearly two decades of obscurity. Frost's grandfather bought the young couple a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, and for nine years Frost worked the land while writing poetry in the early morning hours. The farming failed. The poetry accumulated in drawers.

He turned to teaching, first at Pinkerton Academy, then at what is now Plymouth State University. He was nearly forty years old. He had published almost nothing. By any conventional measure, he was a failure.

Then, in 1912, he made a decision that would change everything. He sailed with his family to England.

The English Breakthrough

Why England? Frost never fully explained. Perhaps he sensed that American publishers wouldn't give him a chance. Perhaps he simply needed to escape.

The Frosts settled in Beaconsfield, a small town in Buckinghamshire outside London. Within a year, a British publisher released his first book of poetry, A Boy's Will. The following year came North of Boston.

In England, Frost found his people. He befriended Edward Thomas, a poet who would die in the First World War and for whom Frost would write "The Road Not Taken." He met Ezra Pound, the avant-garde American expatriate who would become one of the most influential figures in modern poetry. Pound wrote the first favorable American review of Frost's work, though Frost later resented what he called Pound's attempts to "manipulate his American prosody."

Prosody means the patterns of rhythm and sound in poetry. Frost had developed his own approach, which he called "the sound of sense." He wanted his poems to capture the way people actually talked—the rhythms of New England speech, the intonations of farmers and neighbors and wives. He once said that if you listened to two people talking through a closed door, you should be able to understand the emotional meaning of the conversation from the sound alone, even without hearing the words. That was what he wanted his poetry to achieve.

The Return and the Rise

In 1915, with the First World War consuming Europe, Frost returned to America. His English books had been published in American editions, and suddenly he was a known quantity. He bought a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire, and launched what would become one of the most successful careers in American literary history.

The honors accumulated. Frost won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times—a record that still stands. The first came in 1924 for New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes. The second in 1931 for Collected Poems. The third in 1937 for A Further Range. The fourth in 1943 for A Witness Tree.

He taught at Amherst College, on and off, for decades. He taught at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College for over forty years. He was made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard—the university that had once seen him drop out. The University of Michigan gave him a lifetime appointment as a Fellow in Letters.

By the time he was in his eighties, Frost had become what few poets ever become: a public institution. Not just famous, but beloved. Not just respected, but genuinely popular.

The Kennedy Inauguration

On January 20, 1961, Robert Frost stood at a podium in Washington, D.C., preparing to read at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. He was eighty-six years old. He had prepared a new poem for the occasion, titled "Dedication."

But the winter sun was blinding. The glare on the white paper made it impossible for his aging eyes to read the words. Vice President Lyndon Johnson tried to shade the page with his top hat, but it didn't help.

So Frost did what any master does when circumstances defeat preparation. He improvised. He set aside "Dedication" and recited from memory a poem he had written decades earlier, "The Gift Outright."

The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people.

It was a poem about America becoming America—about the moment when colonists stopped being European exiles and started being something new. Kennedy had specifically requested this poem as an alternative, knowing it by heart himself. When Frost finished, the crowd erupted.

Two years later, Frost was dead.

The Shadow Behind the Sunshine

The public Frost was genial, witty, avuncular. He looked like a grandfather you'd want to have—white-haired, twinkly-eyed, full of rustic wisdom. He played the role brilliantly.

The private Frost lived a life marked by tragedy that seems almost unbearable in its accumulation.

His father died when he was eleven. His mother died of cancer when he was twenty-six. His sister Jeanie went insane and died in a mental institution. His daughter Irma also went insane and was institutionalized. His son Carol committed suicide. His daughter Marjorie died of puerperal fever after childbirth. Another daughter, Elinor Bettina, lived only one day.

Of his six children, only two outlived him.

His wife Elinor suffered from depression and heart problems throughout their marriage. She developed breast cancer in 1937 and died of heart failure the following year. They had been married for forty-three years.

Mental illness ran through the family like a dark thread. Both Frost and his mother suffered from depression. Looking at his poems through this lens, the darkness becomes harder to miss. When he writes about "desert places" or being "acquainted with the night," he's not being metaphorical. He knows these territories from the inside.

What the Critics Missed

For decades, critics dismissed Frost as old-fashioned. While T.S. Eliot was fragmenting language in "The Waste Land" and Ezra Pound was making it new with imagism and ideograms, Frost was writing poems that rhymed and scanned and told stories. He seemed to be looking backward while everyone else looked forward.

Frost himself was contemptuous of free verse—poetry without regular meter or rhyme. He famously compared it to "playing tennis without a net." The metaphor is revealing. Frost believed that the self-imposed restrictions of traditional form actually freed the poet to focus on content. The net wasn't an obstacle. It was what made the game worth playing.

But here's where the critics went wrong. They assumed that traditional form meant traditional content, that accessible language meant shallow thinking. Jarrell's essay "To The Laodiceans" attacked this assumption directly. "The regular ways of looking at Frost's poetry are grotesque simplifications, distortions, falsifications," he wrote. Reading Frost carefully should be enough "to dispel any of them."

Take "Neither Out Too Far Nor In Too Deep," a poem about people standing on a beach, looking at the sea. It seems like a simple nature poem until you realize that Frost is writing about the limits of human knowledge, about how we stare at what we cannot understand and understand neither it nor ourselves. The final lines are chilling:

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

That's not comforting. That's existential terror dressed in common words.

The Classical Foundation

Part of what made Frost so distinctive was his education. At Lawrence High School, at Dartmouth, at Harvard, his training was based mainly on Greek and Roman classics. He read Homer and Virgil, Euripides and Sophocles, in the original languages.

The classicist Helen Bacon has traced specific connections between Frost's poems and ancient Greek literature. She argues that "Birches" and "Wild Grapes," two of his most famous early poems, draw imagery and action from Euripides' play The Bacchae—a tragedy about the god Dionysus destroying a king who refuses to acknowledge divine power. The motif of a tree bent down to earth, which appears in both Frost poems, comes from a "very attentive reading of Bacchae, almost certainly in Greek."

This classical foundation helps explain why Frost's "simple" poems feel so weighty. He was drawing on twenty-five centuries of Western literature while making it sound like a conversation between neighbors. That combination of depth and accessibility is extraordinarily difficult to achieve.

The Crossroads Poet

The Poetry Foundation places Frost's work "at the crossroads of nineteenth-century American poetry and modernism." On one side, his use of traditional forms—sonnets, blank verse, rhyming quatrains. On the other, his use of everyday language and ordinary subject matter.

His contemporary Edwin Arlington Robinson also wrote about New England, but Robinson's poetry was more consciously literary, more obviously "poetic." Frost wanted something different. He wanted his verse to sound like speech. Editors Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair noted that Frost's poems "show a successful striving for utter colloquialism" while still using traditional forms.

This striving was influenced by British and Irish writers—Thomas Hardy and W.B. Yeats in particular—who had shown that you could write formal poetry in a natural voice. Frost took that lesson and made it American.

The Quarrel with the World

Frost died on January 29, 1963, in a Boston hospital. He was eighty-eight years old. He had lived through two world wars, the Great Depression, the atomic bomb, and the early years of the Cold War. He had watched his children die and his wife die and his sanity fray at the edges. He had also become the most honored poet in American history.

He is buried in the Old Bennington Cemetery in Vermont. His epitaph comes from the last line of his poem "The Lesson for Today":

I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

A lover's quarrel. Not hatred, not rejection, not indifference. Love, complicated by argument. That's what Frost's poetry enacts again and again—a deep engagement with the world's beauty and horror, rendered in the plainest possible language.

When Seamus Heaney wrote in his "hushed and lulled" voice, he was working in a tradition that Frost had helped establish: poetry that sounds natural but isn't, poetry that seems simple but isn't, poetry that comforts on first reading and disturbs on second.

Frost knew what he was doing. "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader," he wrote. "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader." He described the experience of writing a poem as "the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew."

That's what his best poems still offer: the surprise of recognition, the feeling that someone has said something you've always known but never quite articulated. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. Good fences make good neighbors. Something there is that doesn't love a wall.

These phrases have entered the language because they feel inevitable, as if they had always existed and Frost simply wrote them down. That apparent simplicity is the hardest thing in poetry to achieve. It took Frost forty years of failure to master it.

And then he made it look easy.