Robert Frost was an American poet born in 1874 in San Francisco. He published his first poem in 1894 and went on to publish several collections of poetry. Frost was awarded four Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry and was known as the unofficial poet laureate of the United States. Though he used traditional poetic forms, Frost's poems also explored psychological complexity and ambiguity through his depictions of the New England landscape and use of language.

1. ROBERT
FROST
American Poet

2. 1840-1963
unofficial poet laureate of the United States

3. Robert Frost was born in
San Francisco, California.
At 11, watched his father die of TB.
Mother resumed her career as a
schoolteacher to support her family.
The family moved to
Massachusetts, with Frost’s
paternal grandfather.
After high school, attended
Dartmouth briefly.

4. Worked middling jobs
Had his first poem,‖ My Butterfly"
published in 1894 in a NYC literary
journal
Married in 1895
Enrolled at Harvard in 1897, dropped
out after two years due to health
issues.
He and wife moved to New
Hampshire farm in 1900; next 12
years were productive period in his
writing, difficult personally
5 children; 2 died young
Sold farm, he and family moved to
England

5. Met and won the critical favor of
Ezra Pound
Long walks in English countryside
inspired one of his most famous
poems, ―The Road Not Taken‖
Returned to U.S. in 1915 amid WWI
In 1916, settled in New
Hampshire, embarked on long
career of teaching, mostly at
Amherst College
Awarded 4 Pulitzer Prizes for poetry

6. By 1920s, most celebrated poet in America.
First poet at a Presidential inauguration – Kennedy’s, 1961

8. Like the nineteenth-century
Romantics, he maintained that a poem is
"never a put-up job.... It begins as a lump
in the throat, a sense of wrong, a
homesickness, a loneliness. It is never a
thought to begin with. It is at its best
when it is a tantalizing vagueness."

9. According to Frost, "the self-imposed
restrictions of meter in form and of
coherence in content" work to a poet's
advantage; they liberate him from the
experimentalist's burden—the perpetual
search for new forms and alternative
structures.
He never completely abandoned
conventional metrical forms for free
verse, as so many of his contemporaries
were doing. (Lawrence Thompson)

10. Frost: ―Writing free
verse is like playing
tennis with the net
down.‖

11. And yet … a quintessentially modern
poet in:
• his adherence to language as it is
actually spoken
• the psychological complexity of his
portraits
• the degree to which his work is infused
with layers of ambiguity and irony

12. What Frost achieved in his poetry was
much more complex than a mere
imitation of the New England farmer
idiom. He wanted to restore to literature
the "sentence sounds that underlie the
words," the "vocal gesture" that enhances
meaning. That is, he felt the poet's ear
must be sensitive to the voice in order to
capture with the written word the
significance of sound in the spoken word.

13. The austere and tragic view of life that
emerges in so many of Frost's poems is
modulated by his metaphysical use of detail.
As Frost portrays him, man might be alone
in an ultimately indifferent universe, but
he may nevertheless look to the natural
world for metaphors of his own condition.
Thus, in his search for meaning in the
modern world, Frost focuses on those
moments when the seen and the
unseen, the tangible and the spiritual
intersect.

14. Frost: "Poetry begins in trivial
metaphors, pretty metaphors, 'grace'
metaphors, and goes on to the
profoundest thinking that we have.
Poetry provides the one permissible
way of saying one thing and meaning
another .... Unless you are at home in
the metaphor, unless you have had your
proper poetical education in the
metaphor, you are not safe anywhere."

15. Stopping By Woods on a
Snowy Evening

16. ―The insistent whisper of death at the
heart of life‖ – the poem portrays a
speaker who stops his sleigh in the midst
of a snowy woods only to be called from
the inviting gloom by the recollection of
practical duties. Frost himself said of this
poem that it is the kind he'd like to print
on one page followed with "forty pages
of footnotes."

18. ROBERT
FROST
American Poet