A short life of the author
Robert Lee Frost (1874–1963) was born on 26 March 1874 in San Francisco. His father, William Prescott Frost Jr., was a journalist and political operative who died of tuberculosis when Robert was eleven; his mother, Isabelle Moodie, a Scottish-born schoolteacher, moved the family to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where Frost grew up in the New England landscape that would become the setting for virtually all his poetry.
Life and Career
Frost attended Dartmouth briefly and then Harvard for two years (1897–1899) without completing a degree at either institution. For the next decade he worked as a farmer in Derry, New Hampshire (the farm was a gift from his grandfather), taught school, and wrote poetry that no American editor would publish. In 1912, at thirty-eight, he made the desperate gamble of selling the farm and moving his family to England, where he hoped to find an audience.
The gamble paid off spectacularly. In England, Frost befriended Ezra Pound, Edward Thomas (whom he profoundly influenced), and other poets, and published his first two collections: A Boy’s Will (1913, David Nutt, London), a conventional debut, and North of Boston (1914, David Nutt), the breakthrough. North of Boston — containing “Mending Wall,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Home Burial,” and “After Apple-Picking” — revealed a wholly original voice: dramatic narratives and monologues in a plain American speech rhythm that was as innovative, in its way, as anything the free-verse modernists were producing.
The family returned to America in 1915, and Frost’s American career began in earnest. Mountain Interval (1916) contained “The Road Not Taken” and “Birches.” The Pulitzer Prizes followed — for New Hampshire (1923), Collected Poems (1930), A Further Range (1936), and A Witness Tree (1942) — and Frost became the most honoured and publicly visible American poet of his century. He taught at Amherst College, the University of Michigan, Dartmouth, and Harvard; he was a fixture at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont; and in 1961, at eighty-six, he read “The Gift Outright” at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy — the first poet to participate in a presidential inauguration.
Behind the genial public mask was a darker life. His son Carol committed suicide in 1940. His daughter Irma was institutionalised for mental illness. His wife, Elinor White Frost, died in 1938 after a series of heart attacks; Frost never fully recovered. The biographer Lawrance Thompson, whom Frost himself appointed, produced a three-volume life that depicted the poet as a monster of jealousy, cruelty, and self-pity — a characterization now generally considered overdrawn but not entirely unfounded.
Frost died on 29 January 1963 in Boston.
Major Works and Themes
Frost is the great illusionist of American poetry: his poems appear simple — rhymed, metered, set in familiar New England landscapes of stone walls, birch trees, and snowy woods — but they are as formally sophisticated and thematically complex as anything in modernism. Beneath the pastoral surface lie violence, madness, isolation, and the void.
“Mending Wall” (1914) — “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” — is ostensibly about two neighbours repairing a stone wall in spring, but it is really about the human need for boundaries and the countervailing need to question them. “The Road Not Taken” (1916), universally misread as an inspirational poem about individuality, is actually an ironic meditation on the human tendency to construct self-justifying narratives after the fact.
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923) — “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep” — achieves an almost unbearable intensity of suggestion in sixteen lines: the seduction of oblivion, the pull of duty, the lonely rider in the winter darkness. “Home Burial” (1914) is one of the greatest dramatic poems in the language: a husband and wife tearing each other apart over the death of their child, in dialogue of devastating naturalism.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Frost’s reputation has always been double. To the general public he was the wise, folksy sage of New England — the farmer-poet, the good grey poet of “Stopping by Woods.” To his peers and to critics, he was a far more dangerous and interesting figure: Lionel Trilling, in a famous speech at Frost’s eighty-fifth birthday dinner, called him “a terrifying poet,” shocking an audience that expected tributes. Both perceptions contain truth.
His formal influence on American poetry was eclipsed by the free-verse tradition that descended from Whitman through Pound and Williams, but his example — that traditional forms could contain modern consciousness — has been championed by the New Formalists and by poets like Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, and Seamus Heaney (who dedicated a major essay to Frost).
Key Works
- A Boy’s Will (1913)
- North of Boston (1914)
- Mountain Interval (1916)
- New Hampshire (1923)
- West-Running Brook (1928)
- Collected Poems (1930)
- A Further Range (1936)
- A Witness Tree (1942)
- Steeple Bush (1947)
- In the Clearing (1962)
Collecting Frost
Robert Frost is one of the most collected American poets, and his bibliography — spanning half a century of trade editions, limited editions, and Christmas booklets — offers a rich and well-documented field.
A Boy’s Will (1913, David Nutt, London) is the first book. The true first issue has the imprint of David Nutt (not De La More Press) on the title page, and binding state A is in pebbled bronze-green cloth. Fine copies bring $5,000–$20,000 depending on binding state and condition.
North of Boston (1914, David Nutt, London) is the more important book and the cornerstone Frost collectible. The first edition is in dark green cloth. Fine copies bring $5,000–$15,000. The first American edition (Henry Holt, 1914) is also collected.
New Hampshire (1923, Henry Holt) was published in both a trade edition and a signed limited edition of 350 copies with woodcuts by J.J. Lankes. The limited edition is a major collectible at $3,000–$10,000.
The Christmas booklets — small pamphlets of poems Frost sent to friends each holiday season, typically in editions of a few hundred copies — are an important and specialised collecting area. Christmas Trees (1929), Neither Out Far Nor In Deep (1935), and other titles in this series are scarce and bring $500–$5,000 depending on title and condition.
Frost was a willing and generous signer, particularly in his later years, and signed copies of his major collections are available. Inscribed copies with substantive inscriptions are more valuable. His autograph letters surface regularly at $1,000–$5,000; letters of literary significance command more. The major Frost archives are at Dartmouth College and the Jones Library in Amherst.