A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z


Robert Frost (1874-1963)

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=196

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Robert Frost including a BIOGRAPHY, online primary texts, audio files, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/frost.htm

This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on Robert Frost.

BIOGRAPHY

Although considered a New England poet, Robert Frost was actually born in San Francisco and lived there until the age of eleven when, after the death of his father, he moved with his mother and sister to Salem, New Hampshire. Although he graduated as a high school valedictorian, an honor he shared with future wife Elinor White, Frost could not adjust to college life at Dartmouth or, years later, Harvard. While living in Derry, New Hampshire on the farm bequeathed to him by his grandfather, Frost split his time between farming and teaching at the Pinkerton Academy. During the decade he lived in Derry, Frost composed most of the poems that would go into his first volumes A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914) that he published in England after selling the family farm and moving there in 1912. Living outside of London, Frost struck important literary friendships with the British poet Edward Thomas and the American expatriate Ezra Pound both of whom wrote important reviews of Frost's early work and introduced him to the Irish poet W. B. Yeats. Frost returned to America in 1915 and was greeted by literary success after his next volume Mountain Interval (1916) in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book New Hampshire (1924). Frost would go on to win three more Pulitzers as his verse gained force and he became a leading poet of the 20th Century. Frost suffered domestic tragedy in the deaths of his daughter Marjorie in 1934, his wife Elinor's death in 1938, and the suicide of his son Carol in 1940, not to mention his daughter Irma's affliction with mental disorders. Several of Frost's later critics such as Randall Jarrell and Lionel Trilling would point out the tragic dimensions of his poetic vision beneath the outgoing demeanor of the good, gray New England poet. Although becoming something of an American institution culminating in his reading at President John F. Kennedy's presidential inaugural ceremony, Frost's public image further shifted after his death in 1963 owing to Laurence Thompson's 1970 biography Robert Frost Years of Triumph, 1915-1937 that depicted him as, in the critic Helen Vendler's words, a "monster of egotism." In biographies and criticism, however, Frost received a more fair-minded reception in such works as W. H. Pritchard's A Literary Life Reconsidered (1984) and Stanley Burnshaw's Robert Frost Himself (1986).

SECONDARY SOURCES

Brodsky, Joseph, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott. Homage to Robert Frost. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996.

Faggen, Robert, Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Fleissner, Robert F. Frost's Road Taken. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

Hoffman, Tyler. Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Robert Frost: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999.

Richardson, Mark. The Ordeal of Robert Frost: The Poet and His Poetics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Tuten, Nancy Lewis and John Zubizarreta, Eds. The Robert Frost Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER