212 Poetry for Students
Author Biography
Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874;
his father, William, was a journalist and his mother,
Isabel, was a schoolteacher. After William’s death
(from tuberculosis) in 1885, Frost’s mother moved
herself, Robert, and his sister, Jeanie, to the east,
eventually settling in Salem, Massachusetts in- Frost graduated as co-valedictorian of his
high school class in 1892. (He shared this auspi-
cious title with Elinor White, who he courted and
eventually married.) Frost enrolled in Dartmouth
College but did not complete his first semester.
(The school eventually awarded him two honorary
degrees.) After dropping out, he tried to persuade
Elinor to marry him, but she wanted to first finish
her studies at St. Lawrence University. Distraught,
Frost left New England and roamed about Vir-
ginia’s Dismal Swamp for a short time; Elinor man-
aged to graduate in three years and married Frost
in 1885. The couple had five children, although
their lives were marked by tragedy: Elliott, their
first son, died of cholera at the age of four; Mar-
jorie, their youngest daughter, died after giving
birth at the age of twenty-nine; Elinor died in 1938;
their son Carol committed suicide in 1940; and their
daughter Irma was committed to a psychiatric hos-
pital in 1947.
The history of Frost’s career as a poet is much
more a story of success and triumph. His first pub-
lished poem was “My Butterfly: An Elegy,” col-
lected in a little book of five poems called Twilight
(1894) which Frost had privately printed. (He had
only two copies made—one for Elinor and one for
himself.) After an unsuccessful attempt at farming
and struggling to have his poems read by a wider
audience, Frost moved his family to England in- It was there that Frost published his first two
“real” books of poetry: A Boy’s Will(1913) and
North of Boston (1914). These books showed
tremendous promise and were reviewed favorably
by the American poet Ezra Pound.
In part because of World War I, Frost moved
back to the United States in 1915 and continued to
fulfill the promise of his first two books. In 1916
he published Mountain Interval, containing
“Birches,” “The Road Not Taken,” and “Out,
Out–.” 1923 saw the publication of West Running
Brookand New Hampshire,containing “Stopping
By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and in 1924 Frost
won the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes. Other col-
lections followed: A Further Range(1936), A Wit-
ness Tree(1942), Steeple Bush(1947), and In The
Clearing(1962).
Frost cultivated a public persona that his stu-
dents, critics, and biographers have found, by turns,
irritable, fascinating, and impenetrable—as the
number of books on Frost’s life and work makes
clear. His most notable moment in the public eye
was when he read “The Gift Outright” at the inau-
guration of John F. Kennedy in 1961. Frost died in
1963 two months before his eighty-ninth birthday.
As household a name as any poet could hope to be-
come, Frost enjoyed universal fame for both his
cheerful observations and his dark, often disturb-
ing, ambiguities. His Complete Poemsappeared in
Poem Text
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of
wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other^5
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and
rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said 10
To please the boy by giving him the half hourOut, Out—Robert Frost