Robert Frost

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Born in San Francisco, March 26, 1875 [sic]. Studied at Dartmouth College and Harvard University from 1892 to 1899. Married Miss Elinor M. White, of Lawrence, Mass., and went to live upon a farm at Derry, N.H., where he followed the occupation of farming from 1900 to 1905. Finding it, however, scarcely adequate to the needs of his family, he began teaching English at the Pinkerton Academy at Derry and held this position until 1911 when he became a teacher of psychology in the State Normal School at Plymouth, N.H. In 1912 he took perhaps the most important step in his life up to that period, and with his wife and four young children went to England where he might find a more sympathetic atmosphere for creative work. Most of the poems in "A Boy's Will", his earliest collection, were written prior to his residence in England, but few had been published, and the book was not finally issued in America until after the appearance of "North of Boston", the volume upon which his recognition was based. This book, published first in England, and reprinted in America in 1914, was received with enthusiasm by the foremost English critics who recognized in it a note distinctively individual and distinctively American, and Mr. Frost came back to this country after three years of delightful and fruitful life in England, where he had enjoyed the close companionship of Masefield, Gibson, Abercrombie, and others of the English group — to find his work widely known and appreciated. Nothing finer nor more significant has come out of our poetic revival than Mr. Frost's work, which reflects the life of New England in its more isolated aspects, and interprets the spirit of the people with the keenest insight and the most sympathetic understanding. In the way of form, Mr. Frost has also been a path-finder, building his poems primarily upon the rhythms of the speaking voice. "North of Boston" was followed in 1916 by "A Mountain Interval", containing some beautiful lyric as well as narrative work.

[Robert Frost won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1924 for "New Hampshire", in 1931 for "Collected Poems", in 1937 for "A Further Range", and in 1943 for "A Witness Tree". — A. L., 1998.]