1874-1963
Poet

A Poet of New England.

When Robert Frost recited his poem "The Gift Outright" at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961, he was widely regarded as the greatest living American poet. Having carefully cultivated the image of the grandfatherly farmer-poet for several decades, he had claimed New England as his literary territory and the vernacular of its residents as his poetic voice. Ironically, his public persona tended to blind critics to his accomplishments as a poet and to cause them to overlook how innovative his experiments in capturing the sounds of everyday speech had seemed when he published his second book, North of Boston, in 1914.

Background.

Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco on 26 March 1874. When he was eleven his father died, and Frost, his mother, and his younger sister went to live in Lawrence, Massachusetts, near his paternal grandparents, where...