Those darker truths include the uncertain relations between man and nature, the unending conflicts among men, the tensions that threaten marriage and home, and the limitations of human knowledge. Frost’s poetry reveals fear, competition, and violence lurking beneath the eglitarian ideals of democracy and a will to power hidden beneath jokes and light words. Approachability and clarity mask the complexity and strangeness of his poetry. “It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling/To get adapted to my kind of fooling,” Frost wrote near the end of his life. A great deal of “in and outdoor schooling” informs his poetry from the beginning, and Frost’s life is filled with the contradictions and tensions of both. As a poultry farmer, Frost wrote pastoral and georgic poetry, modes of contemplation and labor, in the tradition of Theocritus and Virgil, whom he read in the original. He memorized hundreds of the best English poems and wore copies of Shakespeare, Arnold, and Browning to tatters. As commanding a reader of Scripture as most theologians, he was also a passionate and learned botanist and amateur astronomer who maintained a lifelong dialogue with science and scientists. A provincial New Englander, he spent three years studying at Harvard and three years in England, where he immediately impressed the leading practitioners of modernism, Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats. The man who was to become America’s most widely read poet published his first book, A Boy’s Will, in England at the age of nearly forty, his boyhood far behind him. His second book, North of Boston, which has been called “the most American of all modern books of poetry,” was written mainly while he lived in England and also published there.

The great poet of New England Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874, and named after the leader of the Confederate Army, General Robert E. Lee. His father, William Prescott Frost, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard, was an ambitious politico in the Democratic party and an aspiring journalist. Unsuccessful at both, he died of consumption when Robert was eleven, leaving the family broke. Isabelle Moodie, Frost’s mother, was a deeply religious woman who baptized her son in the Swedenborgian church. After her husband’s death she moved Robert and his sister, Jeannie, to New Hampshire, where she became a schoolteacher. A first-rate student in high school, Robert was graduated at the top of his class, and was covaledictorian with his future wife, Elinor Miriam White. He also had begun writing poetry, publishing his first effort, “La Noche Triste,” in the school newspaper. Despite his intellect and appetite for knowledge, Frost had little patience for college as he followed his developing talent for poetry and his passion for his fiancée. He enrolled at Dartmouth College and dropped out after less than a term, working then at odd jobs. After a tempestuous courtship, he finally married Elinor.