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Frosts Life And Careerby William H. Pritchard Frosts Life And Careerby William H. Pritchard And Stanley Burnshaw William H. Pritchard Frost was born in San Francisco, where he spent his first eleven years. After the death of his father, a journalist, he moved with his mother and sister to eastern Massachusetts near his paternal grandparents. He wrote his first poems while a student at Lawrence High School, from which he graduated as co-valedictorian with the woman he was to marry, Elinor Miriam White.

He entered Dartmouth College in the fall of 1892 but stayed for less than a term, returning home to teach school and to work at various jobs, including factory-hand and newspaperman. In 1894 he sold his first poem, My Butterfly: An Elegy, to a New York magazine, The Independent. That same year, unable to persuade Elinor to marry him (she wanted to finish college first), he headed south on a reckless journey into Virginias Dismal Swamp. After emerging unscathed he came home to Lawrence where he and Elinor were married in December 1895.

Both husband and wife taught school for a time, then in 1897 Frost entered Harvard College as a special student, remaining there just short of two years. He performed well at Harvard, but his health was uncertain and he rejoined his wife in Lawrence, where she was about to bear a second child. In October of 1900 he settled with his family on a farm just over the Massachusetts line in New Hampshire, purchased for him by his grandfather. There, over the next nine years, he wrote many of the poems that would make up his first published volumes. But his attempt at poultry farming was none too successful, and by 1906 he had begun teaching English at Pinkerton Academy, a secondary school in New Hampshire. That same year two of his most accomplished early poems, The Tuft of Flowers and The Trial by Existence, were published.

Meanwhile he and Elinor produced six children, two of whom died in infancy. After a year spent teaching at the State Normal School in Plymouth, New Hampshire, he sold the Derry farm and in the fall of 1912 sailed with his family from Boston to Glasgow, then settled outside London in Beaconsfield. Within two months of his arrival in England, Frost placed his first book of poems, A Boys Will (1913) with a small London publisher, David Nutt. He also made acquaintances in the literary world, such as the poet F.

S. Flint, who introduced him to Ezra Pound, who in turn reviewed both A Boys Will and North of Boston, which followed it the next year. He became friends with members of the Georgian school of poets particularly with Wilfred Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie and in 1914, on their urgings, he moved to Gloucestershire to be nearer them and to experience English country living. The most important friend he made in England was Edward Thomas, whom Frost encouraged to write poetry and who wrote sharply intelligent reviews of Frosts first two books.

While many reviewers were content to speak of the American poets simplicity and artlessness, Thomas recognized the originality and success of Frosts experiments with the cadences of vernacular speech with what Frost called the sound of sense. His best early poems, such as Main, Mending Wall, and Home Burial, were composed under the assumption that, in Frosts formulation from one of his letters, the ear does it. The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. The best part of a poets work, he insisted, was to be found in the sentence-sounds poems made, as of people talking. Like Wordsworth (as Edward Thomas pointed out in one of his reviews of North of Boston), Frost boldly employed ordinary words and cadences (I have sunk to a diction even Wordsworth kept above, he said in another letter) yet contrived to throw over their Wordsworth's formulation from his preface to the Lyrical Ballads certain colouring of imagination.

England's entry into the First World War hastened Frosts return to America early in 1915. By the time he landed in New York City, his American publisher, Henry Holt, had brought out North of Boston (Holt would continue to publish Frost throughout his life). He was f? ted by editors and critics in the literary worlds of both New York and Boston, and he continued shrewdly to publicize himself, providing anthologists and interviewers with a vocabulary to describe his poetic aims. A third volume of verse, Mountain Interval, published in 1916 but still drawing on poems he had written in England and before, showed no falling off from his previous standard. In fact such poems as The Road Not Taken, An Old Mans Winter Night, The Oven Bird, Birches, Putting in the Seed, and Out, Out were among the best he had written or was to write.

Like the somewhat late-coming and even drab oven bird of his poem, Frost knew in singing not to sing, and a century after the ecstatic flights of romantic poets like Keats and Shelley, Frosts bird remained earthbound (the oven bird, in fact, builds its nests on the ground) and, like the poet who created him, sang about the things of this world. Soon after he re-established himself in America, Frost purchased a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire (he would purchase a number of farms over the course of his life) and then, at the behest of President Alexander Meiklejohn, joined the faculty of Amherst College in Massachusetts. Frost was later to teach at the University of Michigan and at Dartmouth College, but his relationship to Amherst (sometimes a troubled one) was the most significant educational alliance he formed. Meanwhile he had begun the practice of reading his poems aloud rather, saying them, as he liked to put it public gatherings.

These occasions, which continued throughout his life, were often intensive ones in which he would read, comment on, and reflect largely about his poems and about the world in general. Particularly at colleges and universities he commanded the ears and often hearts of generations of students, and he received so many honorary degrees from the academy that he eventually had the hoods made into a quilt. Frost won the first of four Pulitzer Prizes in 1924 for his fourth book, New Hampshire, and followed it with West-Running Brook (1928) and A Further Range (1936), which also won a Pulitzer. Yet the latter volume occasioned, from critics on the left, the first really harsh criticism Frosts poetry had received. One of those critics, Rolfe Humphries, complained in New Masses (his review was titled A Further Shrinking) that Frost no longer showed either a dramatic or a sympathetic attitude toward his New England characters; that in setting himself against systematic political and social reforms (especially, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal), he had become querulous and sarcastic, all too personally present in his quarrel with the way things were going. It is true that, for one reason or another, Frost no longer wrote poems like the dramatic monologues and dialogues in North Of Boston, and that poems from A Further Range, such as Two Tramps in Mud Time or Provide, Provide, were argumentative and at times didactic in their thrust.

But he had become expert at composing poems that had affinities with light verse and that consisted of a pointed, witty treatment of issues and ideas. Such a treatment purchased its surface brilliance at the cost of deeper sympathies and explorations. Those deeper concerns were to make themselves felt once again, however, in what was to be Frosts last truly significant book of verse, A Witness Tree (1942). During the 1930 s, as he became ever more honoured and revered, Frost endured a terrible series of family disasters. In 1934 his youngest and best-loved child, Marjorie, died a slow death from the puerperal fever contracted after giving birth to her first child; in 1938 his wife Elinor died suddenly of a heart attack, then, when he seemed to be pulling things together once more, his son Carol committed suicide in 1940. Another daughter, Irma, suffered as did Frosts sister Jeannie from mental disorders and was finally institutionalized.

A number of poems in A Witness Tree undoubtedly derived their dark tone from the family tragedies suffered over the decade; but at any rate lyrics such as The Silken Tent, I Could Give All to Time, Never Again Would Birds Song Be the Same, and The Most of It stand in the top rank of Frosts work (he himself thought that some of his best poetry was contained in this book). In words from his prose essay The Figure a Poem Makes, they exhibit both how a poem can have wildness and at the same time a subject that shall be fulfilled. Except for the publishing of a major poem, Directive, in his 1947 volume, Steeple Bush, Frosts poetry after the Second World War was mainly occasional, a relaxation from earlier intensities. He made a triumphant return to England in 1957 to receive honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge; he expended his efforts to have Pound released from St Elizabeth's Hospital; and under the Kennedy administration he made a somewhat less-than-satisfactory visit to Russia, in which he attempted, in conversation with Premier Khrushchev, to mediate between the superpowers. His last reading was given to a large audience in Boston in December 1962; the following day he went into hospital for a prostate operation and suffered a severe heart attack while convalescing, then a series of embolisms, one of which killed him in January of 1963. Frost once wrote about Edwin Arlington Robinson that his life was a revel in the felicities of language, and surely the claim could be made, even more appropriately, of Frost himself.

While standing apart from the modernist work of his famous contemporaries Eliot, Pound, Stevens his own poetry, in its complication of tone and its delicate balancing of gravity and wit (I am never more serious than when joking, he said more than once), asks for constant vigilance on the readers part: a listening ear for the special postures of speech and the dramatic effects of silences. Like the works of his great predecessor, Emerson, Frosts poetry has never been sufficiently appreciated in England, the country which gave him his start. This neglect may be in part a reaction to the rather promiscuous admiration he inspired from so many different sorts of American readers (and non-readers), many of whom would have no time for Eliot or Stevens. But if, for some Americans, the homely nature of Frosts material scows, apples, and snow-covered woods predisposes them to like his poetry, such readers are no more narrow than the cosmopolitan ones who accept mythical allusions in Eliot or Pound but disdain stone walls as a fit vehicle for serious poetry. Frosts own formulation to an American friend in 1914 is helpful in thinking about his achievement: he told the friend, Sidney Cox, that the true poets pleasure lay in making his own words as he goes rather than depending upon words whose meanings were fixed: We write of things we see and we write in accents we hear. Thus we gather both our material and our technique with the imagination from life; and our technique becomes as much material as material itself.

It was this principle that Pound saluted in Frost when, in his review of North of Boston, he remarked conclusively: I know more of farm life than I did before I had read his poems. That means I know more of " Life" . From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Copyright? 1994 by Oxford University Press. Stanley Burnshaw Frost, Robert (26 Mar. 1874 - 29 Jan. 1963), poet, was born Robert Lee Frost in San Francisco to Isabelle Moodie, of Scottish birth, and William Prescott Frost, Jr. , a descendant of a Devonshire Frost who had sailed to New Hampshire in 1634. The father was a former teacher turned newspaper man, a hard drinker, a gambler, and a harsh disciplinarian, who fought to succeed in politics for as long as his health allowed.

In the wake of his death (as a consumptive) in his thirty-sixth year, his impoverished widow, with the help of funds from her father-in-law, moved east. She resumed her teaching career in the fall of 1885 in Salem, New Hampshire, where Robert and his younger sister were enrolled in the fifth-grade class. Soon he was playing baseball, trapping animals, climbing birches. And his mother, who had filled his early years with Shakespeare, Bible stories, and myths, was reading aloud from Tom Browns School Days, Burns, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wordsworth, and Percy's Reliques. Before long he was memorizing poetry and reading books on his own. Frosts high school years in Lawrence, Massachusetts, marked a further change.

Greek and Latin delighted him; at the end of the first year he was head of his class. An older student, Carl Burell, introduced him to botany and astronomy. More important, Frost became a promising writer: his poem " La Noche Triste, " inspired by William H. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), appeared in the April 1890 issue of the high school Bulletin, of which he was soon made editor. He joined the debating society, played on the football team, and again was head of his class.

At the beginning of his senior year he fell in love with Elinor White, who had also published poetry in the Bulletin. On commencement day (1892) they shared valedictory honors and, before summer ended, pledged themselves to each other in a secret ritual. In the fall they went their separate ways: Elinor to St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, Frost to Dartmouth on a scholarship and with his grandfathers aid. Though he relished his courses in Latin and Greek and his own wide reading of English verse, in particular Francis Turner Palgraves Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, the campus life dismayed him. Isolated and restless, he quit at the end of December, being needed, he said, to take over his mothers unruly eighth-grade class.

He was nursing the hope that Elinor might give up school to marry him, but when she returned in April his attempts to persuade her failed. After working for months as a trimmer of lamps in a woolen mill in Lawrence, Frost turned to teaching in grade school, while also writing poetry. At the end of the term, startling news greeted him: the New York Independent had accepted " My Butterfly: An Elegy, " with a stipend of $ 15. His first professionally published poem would appear in November could earn his living as a writer! Once again he implored Elinor to marry him; once again she refused. Convinced there was now another suitor, he engaged a printer to make two leather-bound, gold-stamped copies of Twilight, each containing five of his poems.

He took the train to Canton, knocked at her door, and handed her his gift. The inimically cool reception hurled him into despair. Pained and distraught, he destroyed his copy and went home. Still distraught, on 6 November he set out for the Dismal Swamp in Virginia throw his life away? punish Elinor?

make her relent? On 30 November 1894, frightened and worn, he was back in Lawrence. Before long he became a reporter, then returned to teaching. Elinor, having finished college, also taught in his mothers private school. Then at long last, on 19 December 1895, they were married by a Swedenborgian pastor. Nine months later, Elliot, a son, was born.

They both kept working as teachers, and Frost kept publishing poems. In the fall of 1897, thanks to his grandfathers loan, Frost, at age twenty-three, entered Harvard in the hope of becoming a high school teacher of Latin and Greek. Certain courses proved meaningful, most of all in the classics and geology, but also in philosophy with Hugo M? nsterberg, who assigned Psychology: Briefer Course by William James, Frosts " greatest inspiration, " then absent on leave. In March 1899, however, severe chest and stomach pains combined with worries about his ailing mother and pregnant wife forced him to leave Harvard. Medical warnings the threat of tuberculosis drove Frost from the indoor life of teaching.

In May 1900, with his grandfathers help, he rented a poultry farm in Methuen. Two months later, Elliot, the Frosts three-year-old, became gravely ill with cholera infant; on 8 July he died. Frost flailed himself for not having summoned a doctor in time, believing that God was punishing him by taking his child away. Elinor, silent for days, at last let fly at him for his " self-centered senselessness" in believing that any such thing as a gods benevolent concern for human affairs could exist; life was hateful and the world evil, but with a fourteen-month-old daughter, Lesley, to care for, they would have to go on. And when their landlord ordered them to leave by fall, Elinor took matters in hand.

She persuaded Grandfather Frost to buy for their use the thirty-acre farm that her mother had found in Derry, New Hampshire, and to arrange, in addition, for Carl Burell, Frosts high school friend, to move in to help with the chores. The " Derry Years" (1900 - 1911) were especially creative ones, bringing forth complete or in draft nearly all of A Boys Will (1913), much, if not most, of North of Boston (1914), many poems of Mountain Interval (1916), as well as some that appeared in each of his later books. Yet at times in the first two years he was deeply depressed: in November 1900 his mother died; in July 1901, his other firm supporter, Grandfather Frost. But the latter's will bequeathed to his grandson an immediate annuity of $ 500 and after ten years an annuity of $ 800 and the deed to the Derry property. Frost continued to write at night: poems and articles for poultry journals. He enjoyed working the farm by day and learning about the countryside and the lives of its people.

By 1906, though fairly well off compared to his neighbors, yet with four children under seven, he was pressed for money. With the aid of a pastor-friend and a school trustee who admired his poems, he obtained a position at the nearby Pinkerton Academy, which he held with outstanding success. A pedagogic original, he introduced a conversational classroom style. He directed students in plays he adapted from Marlowe, Milton, Sheridan, and Yeats.

He revised the English curriculum. And besides teaching seven classes a day, he helped with athletics, the student paper, and the debating team. At the end of five years, utterly exhausted, he resigned. In the fall of 1911 he was teaching again, part time in the Plymouth, New Hampshire, Normal School. But in December he announced to his editor-friend at the Independent, Susan Ward, that " the long deferred forward movement you have been living in wait for is to begin next year. " In July 1912 he started making plans for a radical change of scene. When he suggested England to Elinor as " the place to be poor and to write poems, Yes, she cried, lets go over and live under thatch. " On 2 September 1912 the Frosts arrived in London.

They stayed there briefly before moving into " The Bungalow" in Beaconsfield, where they would live for eighteen months. Elinor, charmed by the " dear little cottage" and its long grassy yard, strolled the countryside with the children; Frost traveled at will to London forty minutes by train roaming the streets, the bookshops, " everywhere. " Before long he was finishing the manuscript of A Boys Will that he had brought to England and adding a few new poems. In October the book was accepted by David Nutt for publication the following March. Through the next few months Frost was seized by a powerful surge of creativity, producing twelve or more lengthy poems, each strikingly different from the brooding narratives of A Boys Will: dialog-narratives in a style of " living" speech new to the language, exploring the inward lives of ordinary people in the New England countryside. By April 1913, most of (if not all) the poems that would constitute North of Boston had been written. At the January 1913 opening of Monros Poetry Bookshop Frost was urged by the poet Frank Flint to call on Ezra Pound (whom he had never heard of), a reviewer for various journals.

Frost waited until 13 March, about a week before A Boys Will was to appear. At Pounds insistence, they walked to the publishers office for a copy. On their return, Pound started reading at once, then told his guest to " run along home" so he could write his review for Poetry, a new American monthly. In the next few weeks, thanks to Pound and Flint, Frost came to meet some of the best-known writers then living in England, including Yeats, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington, and Ford Madox Ford. A Boys Will, finally issued on 1 April 1913, elicited favorable but qualified reviews.

Chronicling the growth of a youth from self-centered idealism to maturity and acceptance of loss, the thirty-two lyrics offered few hints of the masterful volumes to come, except for those in " Mowing, " " Storm Fear, " and scattered passages. Yeats pronounced the poetry " the best written in America for some time, " leading Elinor to " hope" in vain that " he would say so publicly. " Happily, in the fall, on his return from a family vacation in Scotland, Frost was greeted by two extraordinary tributes in the Nation and the Chicago Dial and a superb review in the Academy. During the next few months, Frost came to know the writers Robert Bridges, Walter de la Mare, W. H. Davies, and Ralph Hodgson; the Georgian poets Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Gibson, Lascelles Abercrombie; and the essayist and poet Edward Thomas, who would become his bosom friend.

With Flint and T. E. Hulme he discussed poetics, having spoken in letters to his Pinkerton friends John Bartlett and Sidney Cox of " the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre" and " the sentence sound [that] often says more than the words. " He also wrote that he wanted not " a success with the critical few" but " to get outside to the general reader who buys books by the thousands. " In April, badly strained for funds, Frost moved his family 100 miles northwest of London to an ancient cottage, not far from Abercrombie's and Gibsons, in the rolling Gloucestershire farmland near Dymock. On 15 May North of Boston appeared, to be hailed in June by important reviews, particularly those by Abercrombie (" there will never be, " said Frost, " any other just like it" ), Ford Madox Ford (" an achievement much finer than Whitman's" ), Richard Aldington (" it would be very difficult to overpraise it" ), and Edward Thomas (" Only at the end of the best pieces, such as The Death of the Hired Man, Home Burial, The Black Cottage, and The Wood-pile, do we realize that they are masterpieces of a deep and mysterious tenderness" ). By August, Frosts reputation as a leading poet had been firmly established in England, and Henry Holt of New York had agreed to publish his books in America. By the end of 1914, however, financial need forced him to leave Britain.

When Frost and his family returned to the United States in February, he was hailed as a leading voice of the " new poetry" movement. Holt's editor introduced him to the staff of the New Republic, which had just published a favorable review of North of Boston, and Tufts College invited him to be its Phi Beta Kappa poet. Before the years end, he had met with Edwin Arlington Robinson, William Dean Howells, Louis Untermeyer (who would become his intimate friend), Ellery Sedgwick of the Atlantic Monthly, and other literary figures. In the following year he was made Phi Beta Kappa poet at Harvard and elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Mountain Interval, which appeared in November 1916, offered readers some of his finest poems, such as " Birches, " " Out, Out, " " The Hill Wife, " and " An Old Mans Winter Night. " Frosts move to Amherst in 1917 launched him on the twofold career he would lead for the rest of his life: teaching whatever " subjects" he pleased at a congenial college (Amherst, 1917 - 1963, with interruptions; the University of Michigan, 1921 - 1923, 1925 - 1926; Harvard, 1939 - 1943; Dartmouth, 1943 - 1949) and " bring around, " his term for " saying" poems in a conversational performance. Audiences flocked to listen to the " gentle farmer-poet" whose platform manner concealed the ever-troubled, agitated private man who sought through each of his poems " a momentary stay against confusion. " In the great short lyrics of New Hampshire (1923) and West-Running Brook (1928) such as " Fire and Ice, " " Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, " and the title poem of the latter books bleak outlook on life persuasively emerges from the combination of dramatic tension and nature imagery freighted with ambiguity.

Only the will to create form, the poet in effect says, can stave off the nothingness that confronts us as mortal beings. In 1930 Frost won a second Pulitzer Prize for Collected Poems the first had been won by New Hampshire and in the next few years, other prizes and honors, including the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry at Harvard. However, when A Further Range appeared in 1936, several influential leftist critics, unaware that Frost had " twice been approached" by the New Masses " to be their proletarian poet, " attacked him for his conservative political views, ignoring the bitter meanings in " Provide, Provide" and such master poems as " Desert Places, " " Design, " and " Neither Out Far nor In Deep. " A Further Range earned him a third Pulitzer Prize in May 1937. Ten months later, on 26 March 1938, Elinor died and his world collapsed. Four years before, in the wake of their daughter Marjorie's death, they had helped each other bear the grief.

Alone now, wracked in misery and guilty over his sometimes insensitive behavior toward Elinor, he hoped to find calm through his children, but Lesley's raging's only deepened his pain. For some time he continued to teach, then resigned his position, sold his Amherst house, and returned to his farm. In July Theodore Morrison invited him to speak at the Breadloaf Writers Conference in August. Frosts lectures enthralled his listeners, but at times his erratic public behavior drew worried attention. To the great relief of his friends, Kathleen Morrison, the directors wife, stepped in to offer him help with his affairs. He accepted at once and made her his official secretary-manager.

Weeks before, however, Kathleen had called at his farm to invite him to visit her at a nearby summer house. Before long he proposed marriage, but she insisted on secrecy, on maintaining appearances. " We wanted to marry, " he told Stanley Burnshaw, his editor in the 1960 s. " It was all decided. But you know how matters seem at times others to think of... It was thought best, " he repeated, " It was thought best" marriage without benefit of clergy, an altered way of life. He continued to bard around and to teach, residing from January through March at " Pencil Pines, " his newly built Miami retreat; at his Cambridge house until late May; then in Ribbon, near Breadloaf, for the summer; and in Cambridge again through December.

During the 1940 s Frost published four new books: A Witness Tree (1942), inscribed " To K. M. /For Her Part in It, " containing some of his finest poems, among them " The Most of It" and " The Silken Tent, " and for which he received his fourth Pulitzer Prize; two deceptively playful blank verse dialogs, A Masque of Reason (1945) and A Masque of Mercy (1947), on the relationship between God and man, to be " taken" in light of his statements on " irony... a kind of guardedness" and " style... the way the man takes himself... If it is with outer humor, it must be with inner seriousness" ; and fourth, Steeple Bush (1947), his weakest volume, although it included " Directive, " one of Frosts major poems. None but his intimates knew of the decades griefs: his son Carols suicide in 1940, his daughter Irmas placement in a mental hospital in 1947.

In the last fourteen years of his life Frost was the most highly esteemed American poet of the twentieth century, having received forty-four honorary degrees and a host of government tributes, including birthday greetings from the Senate, a congressional medal, an appointment as honorary consultant to the Library of Congress, and an invitation from John F. Kennedy to recite a poem at his presidential inauguration. Thrice, at the State Departments request, he traveled on good-will missions: to Brazil (1954), to Britain (1957), and to Greece (1961, on his return from Israel, where he had lectured at the Hebrew University). More important for Frost as an artist and for his readers were the changed perceptions of his works, which began with Randall Jarrells 1947 essay " The Other Frost. " Jarrell saw him as " the subtlest and saddest of poets" whose " extraordinary strange poems express an attitude that, at its most extreme, makes pessimism a hopeful evasion. " Twelve years later Lionel Trilling hailed Frost at his eighty-fifth birthday dinner for his " representation of the terrible actualities of life in a new way, " for though " the manifest America of [his] poems may be pastoral, the actual America is tragic. " And two years earlier, in London at the English-Speaking Union, T. S. Eliot (who in 1922 had dismissed Frosts verse as " unreadable" ) toasted him as " perhaps the most eminent, the most distinguished Anglo-American poet now living, " whose " kind of local feeling in poetry...

can go without universality: the relation of Dante to Florence, ... of Robert Frost to New England. " In the Clearing, Frosts ninth and last collection of poems, appeared on 26 March 1962, the date of his eighty-eighth birthday dinner in Washington, attended by some 200 guests who heard Justices Earl Warren and Felix Frankfurter, Adlai Stevenson, Mark Van Doren, and Robert Penn Warren speak in his honor. Five months later, at the presidents request, Frost made a twelve-day trip to the USSR, where he met with fellow writers and with Premier Nikita Khrushchev. On his return, " bone tired" and exhausted after eighteen sleepless hours, he made some ill-considered public remark, which was taken as a slur on both Khrushchev and President Kennedy. To Frosts deep dismay, the president did not receive him.

On 2 December at the Ford Forum Hall in Boston Frost made his last address and, though admitting he felt a bit tired, he stayed the evening through. In the morning he felt much too ill to keep his doctors appointment. After considerable wrangling, he agreed to enter a hospital " for observation and tests. " He remained in its care until his death in the early hours of 29 January 1963. Tributes poured in from all over the land and from abroad. A small private service on the 31 st at Harvard's Memorial Church for family members and friends was followed by a public one on 17 February at the Amherst College Chapel, where 700 guests listened to Mark Van Dorens recital of eleven Frost poems he had chosen for the occasion. Eight months later, at the October dedication of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst, President Kennedy paid tribute to the poetry, to " its tide that lifts all spirits, " and to the poet " whose sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation. " Within a decade, however, the poets public image was shattered by the appearance of the second volume of Lawrance Thompsons authorized biography, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915 - 1937 (1970), which reviewers took at face value to be an accurate account of a man whom Helen Vendler deemed a " monster of egotism" (New York Times Book Review, 9 Aug. 1970).

Although Frost later came to have grave misgivings about his choice, he had designated Thompson his official biographer in 1939. For whatever reason, the poet felt unable to renounce that decision despite his awareness of Thompsons frequently unsympathetic, even hostile constructions of his attitudes and conduct. Although reviewers perceived in Thompson, as Vendler put it, " an affectation of fairness, " they tended to subscribe, nevertheless, to the " monster-myth" that poisoned Frosts reputation. Evidence that he was not a wrecker of others lives was soon at hand in the form of The Family Letters of Robert and Elinor Frost, edited by Arnold Grade (1972). More than a decade would pass before the tide was turned: first by W. H.

Pritchard's Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (1984) and then by Stanley Burnshaw's Robert Frost Himself (1986), which enabled Publishers Weekly to state that " the unfortunately influential monster-myth stands here convincingly corrected. " Bibliography Significant collections of Frost materials are in the Jones Library in Amherst, Mass. , Amherst College Library, Dartmouth College Library, University of Virginia Library, and University of Texas Library, Austin. In addition to the volumes by Frost cited in the text above, editions of his writings include Collected Poems, Prose & Plays, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark S. Richardson (1995), and " The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, " ed.

M. S. Richardson (Ph. D. diss. , Rutgers Univ. , 1993). Additional correspondence appears in Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer, ed.

Louis Untermeyer (1963), and Selected Letters of Robert Frost, ed. Lawrance Thompson, 1964. Frosts spoken words are transcribed in Robert Frost Speaks, ed. Daniel Smythe (1964); Robert Frost, Life and Talks-Walking, ed. Louis Meeting (1965); Interviews with Robert Frost, ed.

E. C. Later (1966); Robert Frost: A Living Voice, ed. Reginald Cook (1974); and New dicks Season of Frost, ed. William Sutton (1976). Biographical materials include L.

Thompsons typescript " Notes on Robert Frost" (1962; Alderman Library, Univ. of Virginia); Sidney Cox, A Swinger of Birches, with an introduction by Robert Frost (1957); Elizabeth Shelley Sergeant, Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence (1960); Margaret Bartlett Anderson, Robert Frost and John Bartlett: The Record of a Friendship (1963); F. D. Reeve, Robert Frost in Russia (1964); Wade Van Dore, Robert Frost and Wade Van Dore, rev. and ed. Thomas Wetmore (1987); John E.

Walsh, Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost (1988); and Lesley Lee Francis (his granddaughter), The Frost Family's Adventure in Poetry (1994). In addition to The Years of Triumph volume discussed above, L. Thompsons official biography comprises Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874 - 1915 (1966) and Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938 - 1963, with R. H.

Winning (1976). Assessments and criticism of note include Richard Thornton, ed. , Recognition of Robert Frost (1937); Reuben Brower, The Poetry of Robert Frost (1963); Jac There, ed. , Frost: Centennial Essays (3 vols. , 1974 - 1978); R. Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977); and M. S. Richardson, The Ordeal of Robert Frost: The Poet and His Poetics (1997). Source: web American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

Access Date: Sun Mar 18 12: 33: 34 2001 Copyright (c) 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

Research essay sample on Edwin Arlington Robinson Quot Quot