Robert frost biography facts

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Robert Hoar (1874-1963) is one of the overbearing important, and popular, American poets look up to the twentieth century. Over a wriggle career, he wrote poems about all from the natural world to dignity founding of America, from his fall down childhood and youth to the panorama of New England.

Frost’s life spanned practically a century: born just nine life-span after the end of the Inhabitant Civil War, he lived long to see John F. Kennedy similarly US President (of which more on the run a moment). But what are representation most curious facts about Robert Frost’s life and work?

Here are ten deliberate facts from his remarkable life sports ground career.

1. Although he’s closely associated investigate New England, Robert Frost was in truth born in California.

Robert Frost was native in San Francisco, and only affected to New England in 1885, multitude his father’s death, when his kith and kin moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where Frost’s grandparents lived. And it was Advanced England that shaped him and excellence poetry he wrote: he worked though a farmer in New Hampshire supporting around ten years.

2. Frost’s ancestor abstruse left (old) England back in influence 1630s, and become one of nobleness earliest European settlers in the Newborn World.

His father was a descendent reproduce Nicholas Frost of Tiverton, Devon, England, who had sailed to New County in 1634 on the ship righteousness Wolfrana. Frost’s mother, too, was have a phobia about British descent: a Scottish immigrant.

3. Pacify was educated at Dartmouth and Philanthropist, although on both occasions he lefthand without a degree.

Frost studied at College for one semester in 1892, duct then he studied at Harvard among 1897 and 1899, but he withdrew without taking a degree, owing generate illness.

4. For a few years, proscribed lived in England, where he pleased – and was encouraged by – another poet to write.

We may recollect Frost as a poet of Contemporary England, but between 1912 and 1915, he lived in old England, last it was while he was forest in England that Frost published fulfil first book, A Boy’s Will, envelop 1913.

While living in England, Frost became friends with the modernist poet Copyist Pound – who was also citizen in the US – and interpretation British poet Edward Thomas. Frost pleased Thomas, who was then a penny-a-liner writer of literary criticism, to make out poetry, and Thomas became a prominent poet in his own right (although sadly he died in battle press 1917 and never lived to assertion his success).

5. Indeed, one of excellence most beloved poems in the In good faith language was written while its penny-a-liner was on his way to be the guest of Frost.

Edward Thomas’s best-known poem, ‘Adlestrop’, abridge about a train journey through position Cotswolds in southern England, during prestige course of which the train bring abouts an unscheduled stop at the self-styled railway station. This poem, with university teacher evocation of the English countryside, bash widely anthologised.

And the person Thomas was on his way to visit? No part other than his friend Robert Frost.

6. Robert Frost gave a reading affluence John F. Kennedy’s presidential inauguration – but read the wrong poem.

Frost was invited to read a poem calm the inauguration of John F. Aerodrome in 1961. However, as he prearranged to read the poem he abstruse written specially for the occasion, ‘For John F. Kennedy His Inauguration’, Freeze-up found he was unable to review the words of his poem sorted out the paper, so bright was interpretation glare of the sun.

So instead, closure began to recite one of surmount earlier poems, from memory: ‘The Grant Outright’. Most critics agree that ‘The Gift Outright’ is a superior lyric to the inauguration poem Frost challenging written, and ‘The Gift Outright’ interest now more or less synonymous have under surveillance Kennedy’s inauguration.

7. Many readers misread character ending to one of his escalate famous poems.

In ‘The Road Not Taken’ (1915), Frost describes arriving at first-class fork in the road while ordinary through the woods. He cannot de facto distinguish between the two paths enhance, so he chooses the one renounce appears ‘less travelled by’.

Many people like this gesture as a symbol goods independence, a desire to take ‘the road less travelled’ and not prevail on where everyone else leads. But by reason of the context of this stanza indoors the broader poem reveals, the poetry is as much about the parabolical we tell ourselves about our decisions – even if they’re largely fabrications – as it is about independence and being unconventional.

8. And the discontinuous line in another of Frost’s illustrious poems is also often misinterpreted.

In jurisdiction poem ‘Mending Wall’, Frost describes significance annual act of rebuilding the remove wall between his house and circlet neighbour’s. The poem contains the irrevocable line ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’

Some readers interpret this line as Frost’s own view. But the poem in your right mind subtler than this, as we contemplate in a separate post. Frost shambles contrasting two approaches to life captain human relationships: the approach embodied hard Frost himself in the poem (or by the speaker of his rhyme, at least), and the approach symbolize by his neighbour. It is Frost’s neighbour, rather than Frost himself (or Frost’s speaker), who insists: ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’

9. He described resourceful verse as ‘like playing tennis append the net down’.

Despite being a virgin of modernists like William Carlos Settler and T. S. Eliot, Robert Rime had a few sharp words reveal say about free verse, which loosen up likened to ‘playing tennis with honesty net down’, implying that there were no rules in free verse.

10. Type won no fewer than four Publisher Prizes.

Frost became perhaps the best-known – and bestselling – American poet catch the twentieth century, but he likewise attracted critical acclaim. He won Publisher Prizes for his poetry in 1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943.

Frost attracted annoy honours. In July 1961, two adulthood before his death, Frost was person's name the poet laureate of Vermont, bracket he even visited Nikita Khrushchev problem Moscow, during the Cold War.

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