Sean Sutherland Johnson 2/11/2012 Robert Frost Report

Robert Frost was born on March 26th, 1874 in the city of San Francisco, California. He was the son of William Prescott Frost Jr. and Isabelle Moodie. His father was a journalist with major ambitions of establishing a journalism career in California, leading he and his wife to move to San Francisco one year prior to Roberts birth. Roberts father suffered from an untimely death in 1885, when Robert was only eleven years old. This caused his mother to take Robert, along with his sister, Jeanie, to Lawrence, Massachusetts. It wasnt until high school when Robert published his first poem, while also falling in love with his future wife, Elinor White, a student whom shared the same interests in poetry with him. In the year 1890, two years after graduating High School, he achieved his first major publication with his poem, My Butterfly: An Elegy, which would be in an issue of the weekly literary journal, The Independent. It took Frost twenty-one years to actually continue with his writing career when he sailed across the Atlantic to England, in order to publish more poetry. One year later, he published A Boys Will, which was his first book. This book had poems such as Storm Fear, Mowing, and The Tuft of Flowers, which are considered as standard anthology pieces. In 1914, one year after his first collection was published, Frost wrote his second collection of poems, North of Boston, which contained a selection of Frosts most popular poems, including Mending Wall, The Death of the Hired Man, Home Burial, and After Apple-Picking. Frost eventually moved back to the United States in 1915, and little to his knowledge, he was already a famous American poet. Frost later started to explore in the darker side of poetry, publishing poems such as Storm Fear, The Hill Wife, and Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening. These each had a touch of Frosts fresh, mysterious themes that were not traditionally implemented in poetry. Frost went on to face a copious amount of success, to the point where he was chosen to recite his poem, The Gift Outright at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy on January 20, 1961. Frost died on January 23, 1963, two years later, due to complications from prostate surgery. With the success that Frost faced during his lifetime, he will forever go down as one of the most successful and influential poets of the twentieth century.