Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco,
and after his fathers death in 1885, he moved with his family to Lawrence,
Massachusetts, where he became interested in reading and writing poetry while
in high school. Frost attended Dartmouth College and Harvard University, but
never received a degree. He was a jack of all trades, and had many different
occupations after leaving school, including a teacher, a cobbler, and an editor
of the local newspaper, the "Lawrence Sentinel". His first published
poem was "My Butterfly: An Elegy" in the New York
literary journal "The Independent" in 1894. A year later he married
Elinor Miriam White, with whom he shared valedictorian honours with at his
Massachusetts High School.
In the following years, he operated a
farm in Derry, New Hampshire, and taught at Derry's Pinkerton Academy. In 1912,
he sold his farm and moved his family to England, where he could devote himself
entirely to his writing. His efforts to establish himself in England were
immediately successful, and in 1913 he published "A Boy's Will",
followed a year later by "North of Boston". It was in England where
he met and was influenced by such poets at Rupert Brooke and Robert Graves, and
where he established his life-long friendship with Ezra Pound, who helped to promote and publish
his work.
Frost returned to the United states in
1915, and by the 1920's, he was the most celebrated poet in North America, and
was granted four Pulitzer Prizes. Robert Frost lived and taught for many years
in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died on January 29, 1963 in Boston.
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