罗伯特·弗罗斯特 | |||||
Birth Place: | 加利福尼亚州 | ||||
Read works of Robert Frost at 诗海 |
Although he is commonly associated with New England, Robert Frost was a native of California, born in San Francisco, and lived there until he was 11 years old. His mother, Isabelle Moodie Frost, was of Scottish descent; his father, William Prescott Frost, Jr., was a descendant of colonist Nicholas Frost from Tiverton, Devon, England who had sailed to New Hampshire in 1634 on the Wolfrana.
Frost's father was a good teacher, and later an editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin (which was eventually merged into the San Francisco Examiner), and an unsuccessful candidate for the city tax collector. The road not taken for young Robert might have been as a Californian editor rather than a New England poet, but William Frost Jr. died May 5, 1885, debts were settled, and the family moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts where William Frost, Sr., was an overseer at a New England mill. Frost's mother joined the Swedenborgian church and had him baptized in it, but he left it as an adult.
Despite his later association with rural life, Frost lived in the city, and published his first poem in the Lawrence high school magazine. He attended Dartmouth College, long enough to be accepted into the Theta Delta Chi fraternity. Frost returned home to teach and to work at various jobs including delivering newspapers and factory labor. He did not enjoy these jobs at all, feeling his true calling as a poet.
Adult years
"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life — It goes on" -- Robert FrostIn 1894 he sold his first poem, "My Butterfly: An Elegy" (published in the November 8, 1894 edition of the New York Independent) for fifteen dollars. Proud of this accomplishment, he proposed marriage to Elinor Miriam White, but she refused, wanting to finish college (at St. Lawrence University) before they married. Frost then went on an excursion to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia, and asked Elinor again upon his return. Having graduated, she agreed, and they were married in Harvard University, which he attended for two years.
He did well, but left to support his growing family. Grandfather Frost purchased a farm for the young couple in Derry, New Hampshire, shortly before his death. Frost worked on the farm for nine years. He wrote early in the mornings, producing many of the poems that would later become famous. His attempts at farming were not successful, and Frost returned to education as an English teacher at Pinkerton Academy from 1906 to 1911, then at the New Hampshire Normal School (now Plymouth State University) in Plymouth, New Hampshire.
In 1912, Frost sailed with his family to Great Britain, living first in Glasgow, before settling in Beaconsfield, outside London. His first book of poetry, A Boy's Will, was published the next year. In England he made some important acquaintances, including Edward Thomas (a member of the group known as the Dymock Poets), T.E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound. Pound would become the first American to write a (favorable) review of Frost's work. Surrounded by his peers, Frost wrote some of his best work while in England.
As World War I began, Frost returned to America in 1915. He bought a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire, where he launched a career of writing, teaching, and lecturing. The family homestead at Franconia, which served as his summer home until 1938, is maintained as a museum and poetry conference site. From 1916 to 1938, Frost was an English professor at Amherst College, encouraging his students to account for the sounds of the human voice in their craft. Starting in 1921, and for the next 42 years (with three exceptions), Frost spent his summers and into late fall teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English of Middlebury College in Ripton, Vermont. The college now owns and maintains Robert Frost's farm as a national historic site near the Bread Loaf campus. In 1940 Frost bought a five acre property in Coconut Grove, Florida (which would later become South Miami). He called the place Pencil Pines and spent the winters there for the rest of his life.
Frost was 86 when he spoke at the inauguration of President Kennedy on January 20, 1961. He died a little more than two years later, from a blood clot in the lungs. This was a chain reaction from a prostate surgery in December 1962. He died in Boston, on January 29, 1963. He was buried at the Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont. His eptiaph reads, "I had a lover's quarrel with the world."
Harvard's 1965 alumni directory indicates his having received an honorary degree there; Frost also received honorary degrees from Bates College and Oxford and Cambridge universities, and he was the first to receive two honorary degrees from Dartmouth College. During his lifetime, the Robert Frost Middle School in Fairfax, Virginia, as well as the main library of Amherst College, were named after him.
In the "Anthology of Modern American Poetry", published by Oxford University Press, Frost's poems are criticized due to their frequently pessimistic and menacing undertones.
Personal life
Robert Frost's personal life was plagued with grief and loss. His father died of tuberculosis in 1885, when Frost was 11, leaving the family with just $8. Frost's mother died of cancer in 1900. In 1920, Frost had to commit his younger sister, Jeanie, to a mental hospital, where she died nine years later. Mental illness apparently ran in Frost's family, as both he and his mother suffered from depression, and his daughter Irma was committed to a mental hospital in 1947. Frost's wife, Elinor, also experienced bouts of depression.
Elinor and Robert Frost had six children: son Elliot (1896-1904, died of cholera), daughter Lesley Frost Ballantine (1899-1983), son Carol (1902-1940, committed suicide), daughter Irma (1903-?), daughter Marjorie (1905-1934, died as a result of puerperal fever after childbirth), and daughter Elinor Bettina (died three days after birth in 1907). Only Lesley and Irma outlived their father. However, Frost had the unfortunate duty of committing Irma to a mental hospital in 1947. Frost's wife, who had heart problems throughout her life, developed breast cancer in 1937, and died of heart failure in 1938.
_Select_ed Works
Poems
After Apple-Picking
Acquainted With the Night
An Old Man's Winter Night
Birches
Choose Something Like a Star
The Black Cottage
The Code
Come In
The Death of the Hired Man
Departmental
Desert Places
Design
Directive
Dust of Snow
The Fear
Fire and Ice (1916)
For Once, Then Something
The Generations of Men
A Girl's Garden
Good Hours
Good-bye, and Keep Cold
Mending Wall
The Mountain
Neither Out Far Nor in Deep
Dedication
The Gift Outright
Storm Fear
A Soldier
Nothing Gold Can Stay
October
Once By The Pacific(1916)
Out, Out— (1916)
The Oven Bird
Pan With Us
The Pasture
Putting in the Seed
Range-Finding
The Road Not Taken
The Rose Family
The Runaway
The Self-seeker
A Servant to Servants
Home Burial
The Sound Of The Trees
Spring Pools
The Star-Splitter
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
To E.T.
The Tuft of Flowers
Two Tramps in Mud Time
The Wood-Pile
Stars
My November Guest
Ghost House
Tree At My Window
What Fifty Said
The Road That Lost its Reason
Lure Of The West
War Thoughts At Home
Poetry Collections
*North of Boston (David Nutt, 1914; Holt, 1914)
'Mending Wall'
Mountain Interval (Holt, 1916)
The Road Not Taken
_Select_ed Poems (Holt, 1923)
Includes poems from first three volumes and the poem The Runaway
New Hampshire (Holt, 1923; Grant Richards, 1924)
Several Short Poems (Holt, 1924)
Several Short Poems (Holt, 1924)
_Select_ed Poems (Holt, 1928)
West-Running Brook (Holt, 1928? 1929)
The Lovely Shall Be Choosers (Random House, 1929)
Collected Poems of Robert Frost (Holt, 1930; Longmans, Green, 1930)
The Lone Striker (Knopf, 1933)
_Select_ed Poems: Third Edition (Holt, 1934)
Three Poems (Baker Library, Dartmouth College, 1935)
The Gold Hesperidee (Bibliophile Press, 1935)
From Snow to Snow (Holt, 1936)
A Further Range (Holt, 1936; Cape, 1937)
Collected Poems of Robert Frost (Holt, 1939; Longmans, Green, 1939)
A Witness Tree (Holt, 1942; Cape, 1943)
Come In, and Other Poems (1943)
Steeple Bush (Holt, 1947)
Complete Poems of Robert Frost]], 1949 (Holt, 1949; Cape, 1951)
Hard Not To Be King (House of Books, 1951)
Aforesaid (Holt, 1954)
A Remembrance Collection of New Poems (Holt, 1959)
You Come Too (Holt, 1959; Bodley Head, 1964)
In the Clearing (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1962)
The Poetry of Robert Frost (New York, 1969)
A Further Range (published as Further Range in 1926, as New Poems by Holt, 1936; Cape, 1937)
Nothing Gold Can Stay
What Fifty Said
Fire And Ice
A Drumlin Woodchuck
I smoke alot of weed
Plays
A Way Out: A One Act Play (Harbor Press, 1929).
The Cow's in the Corn: A One Act Irish Play in Rhyme (Slide Mountain Press, 1929).
A Masque of Reason (Holt, 1945).
A Masque of Mercy (Holt, 1947).
Prose
The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963; Cape, 1964).
Robert Frost and John Bartlett: The Record of a Friendship, by Margaret Bartlett Anderson (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963).
_Select_ed Letters of Robert Frost (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964).
Interviews with Robert Frost (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966; Cape, 1967).
Family Letters of Robert and Elinor Frost (State University of New York Press, 1972).
Robert Frost and Sidney Cox: Forty Years of Friendship (University Press of New England, 1981).
The Notebooks of Robert Frost, edited by Robert Faggen (Harvard University Press, January 2007).
Published as
Collected Poems, Prose and Plays (Richard Poirier, ed.) (Library of America, 1995) ISBN 978-1-88301106-2.
Pulitzer Prizes
1924 for New Hampshire: A Poem With Notes and Grace Notes
1931 for Collected Poems
1937 for A Further Range
1943 for A Witness Tree
Sources
Pritchard, William H. (2000). Frost's Life and Career (http). Retrieved on March 18, 2001.
Taylor, Welford Dunaway (1996). Robert Frost and J.J. Lankes: Riders on Pegasus. Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Library.
Burlington Free Press, January 8, 2008 Article: Vandalized Frost house drew a crowd
Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays. 10/1995 Library of America. Robert Frost. Edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson. Trade ISBN 1-883011-06-X.
Notes
^ Britannica on Frost
^ Muir, Helen. Frost in Florida (Valiant Press, 1995), 41.
^ Nelson, Cary, ed. Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2000), 84.
^ Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays. 10/1995 Library of America. Robert Frost. Edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson. Trade ISBN 1-883011-06-X
^ Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays. 10/1995 Library of America. Robert Frost. Edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson. Trade ISBN 1-883011-06-X