It has been said that Robert Frost was the most popular poet of the twentieth century, and that he was a pioneer in the interaction of rhythm and meter and in the use of vocabulary and inflections of everyday speech. Most Americans recognize his name, and the titles of his more popular poems, but many do not know about him personally, or his childhood. Many of his poems are a reflection of himself and his childhood. A good example is the poem, "Birches.
Robert Lee Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco. He died on January 29, 1963, in Boston. He was named after Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate armies. His father, William Prescott Frost Jr., was a New Englander and a graduate of Harvard. Robert's mother, Isabelle Moodie, was a Scottish-born schoolteacher. After his parents met and had gotten married, they moved to San Francisco where William became a newspaper reporter.
In 1885 William Frost became very sick and died of tuberculosis. He had a problem with alcoholism during his life. Robert's mother took him and his sister, who was born in 1876, to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where his father had requested to be buried. After this, Mrs. Frost was too poor to return to California, so she and her children moved to Massachusetts where she taught school. Robert attended school in Lawrence where he wrote for the school newspaper. He was more focused on grades and learning than his classmates. His dedication paid off and in 1892, he graduated co-valedictorian of his class.
A year after graduation, he married the valedictorian Elinor White. During this time, Robert's grandfather sent him to Dartmouth to become a lawyer. Robert was always impatient in school, so he stayed less than a term. The next few years he stayed at home in Lawrence, and wrote more poetry to accompany the poems he had published in the school newspaper. In 1894, he sold his first poem, "My Butterfly: An Elegy", to The Independent, a weekly New York literary journal.
