Robert Lee Frost
1874-1963

(William Prescott FROST Jr.⁹, Judith COLCORD Frost⁸,
Daniel COLCORD Jr.⁷, Daniel COLCORD⁶, Mehitable LADD Colcord⁵,
Mehitabel PHILBRICK Ladd⁴, Thomas PHILBRICK Jr.³, James², Thomas¹)

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California on March 26, 1874. When his father died in 1885, Frost's mother moved the family east to Lawrence, Massachusetts. Robert was 11 years old at the time. His mother pursued a career as a schoolteacher. Robert continued his education, graduated from high school, and attended Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire for a short while. He wrote poetry, and supported himself variously as a teacher, a mill worker, a cobbler, and a farmer. Robert Frost married Elinor White in 1895. Together they had six children. The fields and woods of New Hampshire farms surrounded Frost as he composed his poetry. However, Frost had only limited success in getting his works published, and he decided he needed a change of scenery. So in 1912 he packed up and moved to England. Here he succeeded in getting two collections of poetry published over the next two years. By the time he returned to the United States in 1915, Frost was known as a poet on both sides of the Atlantic.

The family returned to New England, and Frost was able to pursue his writing. His love for rural settings kept him on farms in New Hampshire and Vermont, and much of his work reflects these pastoral settings. Robert Frost received four Pulitzer prizes during his lifetime. In 1961, the nation watched the televised inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. On that blustery day in Washington, D.C., Robert Frost achieved an unofficial status as the nation's poet laureate as he honored the new president with readings from his poetry. Frost continued to write poetry throughout all his life. 

Robert Frost was one of America's leading 20th-century poets and a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. An essentially pastoral poet often associated with rural New England, Frost wrote poems whose philosophical dimensions transcend any region. Although his verse forms are traditional--he often said, in a dig at archrival Carl Sandburg, that he would as soon play tennis without a net as write free verse--he was a pioneer in the interplay of rhythm and meter and in the poetic use of the vocabulary and inflections of everyday speech. His poetry is thus both traditional and experimental, regional and universal. His widowed mother, Isabelle Moody, was born in Scotland and her intense Scottish loyalties greatly influenced his work, which combines practicality with mysticism.

Robert Frost passed away on January 29, 1963. Return to Photo Page