2. About the poet - Robert Frost

  

Robert Frost was an American poet. He was born in San Francisco on March\(26\), \(1874\), to parents William Prescott Frost Jr. and Isabelle Moodie. His parents had relocated from Pennsylvania shortly after marrying. Later, when Frost was \(11\) years old, his father died of tuberculosis, and the family (consisting of his mother, two-year-younger sister, Jeanie, and himself) moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts. During his high school years in Lawrence, he grew interested in reading and composing poetry, and in \(1892\), he enrolled at Dartmouth Academic in Hanover, New Hampshire, and then at Harvard University in Boston. Despite him attending universities, he never earned a formal college degree.

 

His first published poem, "My Butterfly," appeared on November \(8\), \(1894\), in the New York newspaper The Independent. In \(1895\), he married Elinor Miriam White, who was a major inspiration for his poetry until her death in \(1938\). The family moved to England in \(1912\), which turned out to be a turning point in his life as a poet. His first book of poetry, A Boy's Will, was published the next year. He also made some important acquaintances, including Edward Thomas (Frost's inspiration for "The Road Not Taken"), Rupert Brooke, T. E. Hulme, Robert Graves, and Ezra Pound. In \(1914\), his second volume of poems, North of Boston was published. By the time Frost returned to the United States in \(1915\), his reputation was established, and by the \(1920\)s, he was the most celebrated poet in America.

 

Frost was known for his accurate descriptions of rural life and grasp of American colloquial speech. He frequently wrote about rural settings in early twentieth-centuryNew England, utilising them to explore difficult social and philosophical subjects. He is also the only poet to have received four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry, and was frequently honoured during his lifetime. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature \(31\) times, received the Congressional Gold Medal in \(1960\), was named Poet Laureate of Vermont on July \(22\), \(1961\), and won the Bollingen Prize in \(1963\).

 

Some of his poetry collections are,

Frost died in Boston on January \(29\), \(1963\), aged \(88\), of complications from prostate surgery. He was buried at the Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont. His epitaph quotes the last line from his poem, "The Lesson for Today" (\(1942\)): "I had a lover's quarrel with the world."