Frost, Robert (Lee)

Frost, Robert [Lee] (1874–1963), member of a New England family, was born in San Francisco and taken at the age of ten to the New England farm country with which his poetry is identified. After a brief attendance at Dartmouth, where he disliked the academic attitude, he became a bobbin boy in a Massachusetts mill, and a short period at Harvard was followed by further work, making shoes, editing a country newspaper, teaching school, and finally farming. This background of craftsmanship and husbandry had its effect upon his poetry in more than the choice of subjects, for he demanded that his verse be as simple and honest as an axe or hoe. After a long period of farming, he moved to England (1912–15), where he published his first book of poems, A Boy's Will (1913), whose lyrics, including Into My Own, Revelation, Mowing, and Reluctance, are marked by an intense but restrained emotion and the characteristic flavor of New England life. He returned to the U.S. to settle on a New Hampshire farm, having achieved a reputation as an important American poet through the publication of North of Boston (1914), described by the author as “a book of people,” and showing brilliant insight into New England character and the background that formed it. Among the poems in this volume are “Mending Wall,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “The Code,” “The Wood‐Pile,” “Home Burial,” and “A Servant to Servants.” The same expressive idiom and brilliant observation appear in Mountain Interval (1916), containing such characteristic poems as “The Road Not Taken,” “Birches,” Bond and Free, A Time To Talk, Snow, Putting in the Seed, and An Old Man's Winter Night.

The shrewd humor and Yankee understatement that distinguish such poems as The Cow in Apple Time, A Hundred Collars, and Brown's Descent are exhibited also in Frost's witty self‐critical remarks, such as “I might be called a Synecdochist; for I prefer the synecdoche in poetry—that figure of speech in which we use a part for the whole.” In both emotion and language he was restrained, and conveyed his messages by implication. Although his blank verse is colloquial, it is never loose, for it possesses the pithy, surcharged economy indigenous to the New Englander. His genre pieces, in the form of dramatic idylls or monologues, capture the vernacular of his neighbors north of Boston. Frost explained his realism by saying, “There are two types of realist—the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real one; and the one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean…. To me, the thing that art does for life is to clean it, to strip it to form.” His next book, New Hampshire (1923, Pulitzer Prize), shows his ability to deal with genial, informal subjects, as in “The Star‐Splitter,” “Maple,” “The Axe Helve,” “New Hampshire,” and Paul's Wife, and to concentrate emotional impact into a few clean‐stripped lines, as in “To Earthward,” “Two Look at Two,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Gathering Leaves, Fire and Ice, and Fragmentary Blue. In 1928 he issued a fifth new volume, West‐Running Brook, with the same warm lyric quality that had characterized his first book. His Collected Poems (1930, Pulitzer Prize) assembled in one volume the work that has a lifelong continuity in its rhythms, its clear focusing on the individual, and its observation of the native New England background.

After collecting his poems, although he held positions as an affiliated teacher at Amherst, Harvard, and Michigan, he continued his literary career and in 1936 published A Further Range (Pulitzer Prize), whose lyrics, though more playful in blending fact and fantasy, have beneath their frivolity a deep seriousness. A new edition of Collected Poems (1939) was followed by A Witness Tree (1942, Pulitzer Prize); two blank‐verse plays, A Masque of Reason (1945), about Job, and A Masque of Mercy (1947), in which Biblical characters in modern setting discuss ethics and man's relation to God; and Steeple Bush (1947) and In the Clearing (1962), later lyrics. The standard collected edition is The Poetry of Robert Frost (1969), edited by Edward C. Lathem. His correspondence appears in Letters to Louis Untermeyer (1963) and Selected Letters (1964), edited by Lawrance Thompson. Thompson published a controversial full biography—as official biographer—Robert Frost (3 vols., 1966–77), giving a harsh view of the poet. A less tendentious treatment is by William H. Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (1984).