Frost, Robert Lee

Born Mar. 26, 1874, in San Francisco; died Jan. 29, 1963, in Boston. American poet.

Frost published his first collection, A Boy’s Will (1913), in Great Britain, where he lived from 1912 to 1915. His choice of realistic themes, creation of a poetry of the familiar, and use of colloquial speech allowed him to express a popular view of modern ethical and social problems, for example, in the collection North of Boston (1914). In the collections New Hampshire (1923) and A Further Range (1936), Frost conveyed the sense of an inevitable disintegration of a once integrated rural world and the atmosphere of ethical crisis in contemporary civilization. Striving toward a harmonious perception of the world, Frost experienced acutely the tragic quality of man’s effort to restore his link with nature. The lyrical poems of his later collections, such as In the Clearing (1962), are marked by profound thought and vivid originality and are masterpieces of English language poetry.

Frost won Pulitzer Prizes in 1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943. In 1962 he visited the USSR.