Although known as the chief interpreter of the new New England, Robert (Lee) Frost was born in San Francisco, California, March 26, 1875. At the age of ten he came East to the towns and hills where, for eight generations, his forefathers had lived. After graduating from the high school at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1892, Frost entered Dartmouth College, where he remained only a few months. The routine of study was too much for him and, determined to keep his mind free for creative work, he decided to earn his living and became a bobbin boy in one of the mills at Lawrence. He had already begun to write poetry; a few of his verses had appeared in The Independent. But the strange soil-flavored quality which even then distinguished his lines was not relished by the editors, and the very magazines to which he sent poems that today are famous, rejected his verse with amazing unanimity. For twenty years Frost continued to write his highly characteristic work in spite of the discouraging apathy, and for twenty years the poet remained unknown.

In 1897, two years after his marriage, Frost moved his family to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and entered Harvard in a final determination to achieve culture. This time he followed the cut-and-dried curriculum for two years, but at the end of that period he stopped trying to learn and started to teach. For three years he taught school, made shoes, edited a weekly paper, and in 1900 became a farmer at Derry, New Hampshire. During the next eleven years Frost labored to wrest a living from the stubborn rocky hills with scant success. Loneliness claimed him for its own; the ground refused to give him a living; the literary world continued to remain oblivious of his existence. Frost sought a change of environment and, after a few years’ teaching at Derry and Plymouth, New Hampshire, sold his farm and, with his wife and four children, sailed for England in September, 1912.

For the first time in his life, Frost moved in a literary world. London was a hot-bed of poets; groups merged, dissolved and separated over night; controversy and creation were in the air. Frost took his collection of poems to a publisher with few hopes, went back to the suburban town of Beaconsfield and turned to other matters. A few months later A Boy’s Will (1913), his first collection, was published and Frost was recognized at once as one of the few authentic voices of modern poetry.

A Boy’s Will, unlike the later volumes, is frankly subjective; original in outlook and idiom in spite of certain reminiscences of Browning. Chiefly lyrical, this volume, lacking the concentrated emotion of his subsequent works, is a significant introduction to the following book, which has become a contemporary classic. Early in 1914, Frost leased a small place in Gloucestershire, his neighbors being the poets Lascelles Abercrombie and W. W. Gibson. In the spring of the same year, North of Boston (1914), one of the most intensely American books ever printed, was published in England. (See Preface.) This is, as he has called it, a “book of people.” And it is more than that—it is a book of backgrounds as living and dramatic as the people they overshadow. Frost vivifies a stone wall, an empty cottage, an apple-tree, a mountain, a forgotten wood-pile left

North of Boston, like its successor, contains much of the finest poetry of our time. Rich in its actualities, richer in its spiritual values, every line moves with the double force of observation and implication. The first poem in the book illustrates this power of character and symbolism. Although Frost is not arguing for anything in particular, one senses here something more than the subterranean enemies of walls. In “Mending Wall,” we see two elemental and opposed forces. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” insists the seeker after causes; “Good fences make good neighbors,” doggedly maintains the literal-minded lover of traditions. Here, beneath the whimsical turns and pungency of expression, we have the essence of nationalism versus the internationalist; the struggle between a blind responsibility and a pagan iconoclasm.

So with all of Frost’s characters. Like the worn out incompetent in “The Death of the Hired Man” (one of the finest genre pictures of our time), the country boy in “Birches,” or the positive, tight-lipped old lady in “The Black Cottage,” his people are always intensified through the poet’s circumlocutory but precise psychology. They remain close to their soil. Frost’s monologs and dramatic idyls, written in a conversational blank verse, establish the connection between the vernacular and the language of literature; they remain rooted in realism. But Frost is never a photographic realist. “There are,” he once said, “two types of realist—the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real one; and the one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean. I’m inclined to be the second kind.... To me, the thing that art does for life is to strip it to form.”

In March, 1915, Frost came back to America—to a hill outside of Franconia, New Hampshire, to be precise. North of Boston had been published in the United States and its author, who had left the country an unknown writer, returned to find himself famous. Mountain Interval, containing some of Frost’s most beautiful poems (“Birches,” “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” “The Hill Wife”), appeared in 1916. The idiom is the same as in the earlier volumes, but the notes are more varied, the convictions are stronger. The essential things are unchanged. The first poem in Frost’s first book sums it up:

The fanciful by-play, the sly banter, so characteristic of this poet, has made his grimness far less “gray” than some of his critics are willing to admit. This elfin whimsy winks through the broad bucolic humor of “The Cow in Apple Time,” the mock pity of “The Road Not Taken,” the tenderness of “The Runaway” and the lovely apostrophe to an orchard in “Good-Bye and Keep Cold.”

Frost taught at Amherst College from 1916 to 1919, but found that his association with scholastic life took too much of his creative energy. In 1920, therefore, he bought a few acres in Vermont and devoted himself once more to the double labors of farmer and poet. Through his lyrics as well as his quasi-narratives, he has uttered (and is voicing) some of the deepest and richest notes in American poetry.