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Literary Story of the Week -
On August 29, 1962, poet Robert Frost traveled to the
Soviet Union on a goodwill tour sponsored by the U.S. State Department in an
effort to soften Cold War relations. Frost’s poetry has established his
international reputation as American’s unofficial poet laureate. While his best
work appeared in earlier decades, he is nevertheless seen as an elder statesman
of literature.
Despite his close association with New England, Robert
Frost was born on March 26, 1874 in San Francisco, California. His father, a
journalist, died when Robert was 11 and Frosts mother moved to Massachusetts.
Frost graduated as co-valedictorian of his high school class and then attended
Dartmouth and Harvard, but didn’t complete a degree at either school. Three
years after high school, he married his high school sweet heart, Elinor White.
Frost tried unsuccessfully to run a New England farm, and
the family, which would eventually include six children, struggled with poverty
for two decades. Frost became more and more depressed and in 1912, he moved his
family to England to make a fresh start. There he concentrated on his poetry
and in 1913 published a collection called A
Boy’s Will, which won praise from English critics and helped him win a U.S.
publishing contract for his second poetry book, North of Boston (1914). The American public took a liking to the
40-year-old Frost, who returned to the U.S. when World War I broke out. He
bought another farm in New Hampshire and continued to write poetry. Frosts wife
died in 1938 from heart failure and he remained single the remainder of his
life.
He taught and lectured at Amherst, the University of
Michigan, Harvard, and Dartmouth, and read from his work at the inauguration of
President Kennedy in 1960. He also endured personal tragedy when a son
committed suicide and a daughter had a mental breakdown. His last poetry
collection, In the Clearing, was
published in 1962. While Frost never graduated from a university, he collected
44 honorary degrees before he died on January 29, 1963 in Boston and was buried
at the Bennington Old Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont.
Check back every
Friday for a new installment of “This Week in Literary History.”
Michael Thomas Barry is the author of six nonfiction
books that includes America’s Literary
Legends and Literary Legends of the
British Isles. Visit Michael’s website www.michaelthomasbarry.com for
more information. His books can be purchased from Amazon through the following
links:
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