Today is the anniversary of the birth of Robert Frost, a 20th Century American poet born March 26, 1874 in San Francisco. Some poets achieve their greatest fame only after they’re gone, but Frost was widely celebrated during his lifetime, and is still the only poet to win four Pulitzer Prizes.
Frost’s family moved across the country from San Francisco to Massachusetts when his father died in 1885. They lived with Frost’s grandfather, who managed a mill, and Frost grew up in the city of Lawrence. Although his poetry mostly celebrated rural life in North America, Frost’s childhood was entirely in cities: San Francisco and Lawrence, Massachusetts. He began writing during high school, and published his first poem in the school magazine.
After high school Frost attended Dartmouth College, but only stayed for two months. He went back home and worked odd jobs. In later life he said even at the time he felt his true calling was poetry. He sold his first poem to The Independent in 1894: My Butterfly. An Elegy. He was so proud of it that he proposed marriage to his girlfriend, who was still in college. She turned him down, saying she wanted to graduate first. She did, in 1895, and they were married that year.
Frost gave college another try in 1897, attending Harvard University from 1897 to 1899, but once again left. When he quit Harvard, his grandfather bought him a farm, and he and his wife settled there. They stayed for nine years, and Frost followed a regimen of writing in the morning and farming later. Although this worked out well for his writing — during that period he wrote many of the poems that later became famous — it didn’t work as well for farming (farmers traditionally do their farming in the morning, when Frost was at his writing desk), and he eventually gave it up and became an English teacher. The farm still exists, and is now a museum dedicated to Frost.
The Frosts moved to England in 1912, where Frost published his first book of poetry (A Boy’s Will) and he met prominent poets including Ezra Pound. Pound was already a well-known writer and the favorable review he wrote of Frost’s poetry boosted Frost’s success and reputation. Pound also tried to give Frost advice about his poetry, but Frost evidently resented it. The family returned to the US in 1915 due to the World War, and Frost bought another farm — but this time he made no effort to actually do any farming and worked at writing, teaching, and lecturing instead. The family kept the farmhouse until 1938, and that too still exists — it’s now The Frost Place, a museum and conference center for poets.
He won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1924, and went on to win more in 1931, 1937, and 1943. At about that time he also began a tradition of teaching English during the summer and fall terms at Middlebury College, and kept it up for forty-two years. Other than those terms, he moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan to teach at the University of Michigan. The house he lived in still exists and (stop me if you’ve heard this before) is now a museum. The same thing happened to his next house in Shaftsbury, Vermont, which is now Yet Another Robert Frost Museum, the Robert Frost Stone House. In 1940, though, he bought a house in Florida where he spent winters, and that house is unique — it’s not a Robert Frost museum.
Frost won almost every award there was, but not the Nobel Prize for Literature, even though he was nominated 31 times. He’s still considered a major American poet, though, and he’s been mentioned as an influence by a vast array of creators working in poetry and other media. In particular, the writer of A Song of Fire and Ice, which is the basis of A Game of Thrones, has named Frost’s poem Fire and Ice as a major guide to that work.
Frost also wrote at least four plays, and was a prolific letter-writer. A number of collections of his letters have been published. And although there’s no formal accounting, it’s quite possibly true that he holds the world’s record for the most residences turned into museums. He could have just stayed in college in the first place, or focused more on farming, but in both cases he followed a different path, and that made all the difference.
