American poetry -- 19th century; American poetry -- 20th century
Although known as the chief interpreter of the new New England,
Robert (Lee) Frost was born in San Francisco, California, March 26,
1875. At the age of ten he came East to the towns and hills where,
for eight generations, his forefathers had lived. After graduating
from the high school at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1892, Frost
entered Dartmouth College, where he remained only a few months. The
routine of study was too much for him and, determined to keep his
mind free for creative work, he decided to earn his living and
became a bobbin boy in one of the mills at Lawrence. He had already
begun to write poetry; a few of his verses had appeared in _The
Independent_. But the strange soil-flavored quality which even then
distinguished his lines was not relished by the editors, and the
very magazines to which he sent poems that today are famous,
rejected his verse with amazing unanimity. For twenty years Frost
continued to write his highly characteristic work in spite of the
discouraging apathy, and for twenty years the poet remained unknown.
In 1897, two years after his marriage, Frost moved his family to
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and entered Harvard in a final
determination to achieve culture. This time he followed the
cut-and-dried curriculum for two years, but at the end of that
period he stopped trying to learn and started to teach. For three
years he taught school, made shoes, edited a weekly paper, and in
1900 became a farmer at Derry, New Hampshire. During the next eleven
years Frost labored to wrest a living from the stubborn rocky hills
with scant success. Loneliness claimed him for its own; the ground
refused to give him a living; the literary world continued to remain
oblivious of his existence. Frost sought a change of environment
and, after a few years’ teaching at Derry and Plymouth, New
Hampshire, sold his farm and, with his wife and four children,
sailed for England in September, 1912.
For the first time in his life, Frost moved in a literary world.
London was a hot-bed of poets; groups merged, dissolved and
separated over night; controversy and creation were in the air.
Frost took his collection of poems to a publisher with few hopes,
went back to the suburban town of Beaconsfield and turned to other
matters. A few months later _A Boy’s Will_ (1913), his first
collection, was published and Frost was recognized at once as one of
the few authentic voices of modern poetry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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