Conor O’Neill
Honors English
Mr. Richardson
5/20/09
Robert Frost: The Man Behind the Words

Robert Lee Frost, the son of William Prescot Frost Jr. and Isabelle Moodie, was born in San Francisco California on March 26, 1874. Roberts’s father, William Frost, was a journalist whose family sailed to the United States from England in 1634. Roberts’s mother, Isabelle, was a woman of Scottish decent who married William Frost in the late 1800’s. William Prescot Frost was a born jack of trades who liked to try his hand at many different jobs. Working as a lumberjack in his early life, William went on to become the editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. After a failed attempt to become the city tax collector of San Francisco, William Prescot Frost died on May 5, 1885. After the death of his father, Robert Frost and his mother moved across the country to Lawrence, Massachusetts where Robert’s grandfather, William Frost Senior, was an overseer at a mill. Frost had never before seen such snow as he did when he moved to New England. His poetry later in life recounts the glory of the New England winters that he was able to see when he moved to Lawrence. “There’s a patch of old snow in a corner/ That I should have guessed/ Was a blown-away paper the rain/ had brought to rest (“A Patch of Old Snow” by Robert Frost).
While living in Lawrence, Frost’s mother started to teach again in order to help William Sr. support the family. In 1892, Robert Frost graduated from Lawrence High School and went on to school at Dartmouth College. Here he stayed for about 10 months, joining one of the local fraternities, until he dropped out to get a job. Frost worked several different jobs such as paper deliveries and factory work. He enjoyed neither and was miserable for a time until he found the wonders of poetry. He would spend hours writing and reading poetry until he published his first work in 1894. His poem, My Butterfly, sold for $15 (which was a fair amount of money in those days). Flushed with his newfound success, Frost proposed to his former schoolmate, Elinor White. They where married in 1895 and Frost’s life seemed to finally be coming together. In 1897, he left to study at Harvard University where in left without a degree in 1899 so that he could support his growing family. Unfortunately, a year later, Frost’s mother Isabelle died of cancer leaving Frost stricken with grief for a time. Tragedies that struck Robert during his life made an impact on his poetry, casting a shadow on some of his pieces such as “The Fear”.
Shortly before his death, William Frost Senior had purchased a farm for Robert and Elinor in Derry, New Hampshire. It was here that Robert brought his new family and gained much of the inspiration he needed for his poetry. He would write for most of the day and spend the rest of the day farming. The problem was, Frost’s love of poetry took up so much time that his farming expenditures where anything but successful. It was because of this that Frost again returned to the world of academia by beginning to teach at Pinkerton Academy in 1906. A year after he began teaching again, Elinor Bettina, Frost’s newborn daughter, became the second of Robert’s children to die before their time (the other was his son Elliot in 1904 from cholera). Frost was again heartbroken but continued on in order to support his wife and two remaining children, Irma and Lesley.
In 1912, Robert took his family across the sea to England where they settled outside on London. It was here that Frost published his first book, “A Boy’s Will”, in 1913. It was in England that Frost met other poets such as Edward Thomas and Ezra pound. While being surrounded by other poets who shared the same passion as he did for poetry, Frost began to write some of his best work while he was living in England. At the beginning of World War One in 1915, Frost took his family back across the ocean for safety and settled in Franconia, New Hampshire. It was in Franconia that Frost again returned to teaching as well as lecturing and writing. For intervals in between 1916 and 1938, Frost taught English at Amherst College. In 1921, Frost moved to Ann Arbor to teach on a fellowship at the University of Michigan. He stayed here for six more years until he decided to move back to Amherst to resume teaching there. He taught here until 1938 and stayed in the area until 1940. In 1940, Frost purchased a farm in Miami, Florida where he would spend the winter for the rest of his life. Though he had moved away from one of his major sources of inspiration, the New England winter, he remained one of the most renowned and respect poets in the United States until his death in Boston on January 29th, 1963 due to complications from a prostate surgery at the age of 89.
Throughout his long life, Robert Lee Frost acquired many awards and honors from many of the various places that he had been. Frost received an honorary degree from Harvard University where he attended for two years earlier in his life. He also received an honorary degree from Bates College where he had never attended but made some lectures. On top of this, he also received honorary degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge colleges in England. Aside from all of the honorary awards that he received from various Universities in the United States and England, the main Library at Amherst College was named after Robert Frost. Though much of Frost’s life was filled with the grief and sadness of losing a loved one, Frost was never bitter with the world with whom he had a poetic relationship with. As a matter of fact, the epitaph on Frost’s tombstone reads “I had a lovers quarrel with the world”.