I’m a student of literature and history. I love reading and poetry, and when I delve into the history behind creation of famous works of art, I find some amazing facts I didn’t previously know. That’s true about Robert Frost, fondly known as “America’s poet laureate.”
Frost spent his life burying children and that turned his unbearable grief into powerful yet quiet verses. He shaped beauty out of his own heartbreak. His poetry is pastoral, even comforting. Two roads diverging in yellow woods. Good fences making good neighbors. Snowy evenings in the silence of winter. Yet his life was hardly peaceful.
Frost was born March 12, 1864, grew up poor in rural New England. He was anxious and very intelligent. He would read late at night by candlelight. His father, a heavy drinker, died of tuberculosis when Robert was just eleven, leaving the family nearly destitute. His mother, engulfed in grief, provided little stability.
By twenty, Frost married his high school sweetheart, Elinor White, and buried their first child. Elliott died at three years old in 1900. There were many losses that would later define Frost’s life. He tried working as a farmhand, schoolteacher, newspaper editor – all failures. By his late thirties, Frost was bankrupt and desperate for change.
In 1912, at age 38, he made a big gamble by selling the family farm in Derry, New Hampshire to move wife and four surviving children to England. He had yet to publish anything and had no connections. So Robert Frost was betting on a dream that most people thought was impossible. However, that decision changed everything for him and for the literary world.
Frost finally found his voice in a small cottage in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. Between 1912 and 1915, he wrote poems that would make him immortal: “Mending Wall”—about boundaries we build and the relationships they both preserve and destroy; “After Apple-Picking”—exhaustion disguised as pastoral reflection; “Birches”—longing for escape hidden in childhood memory; “Home Burial”—a devastating poem about a couple torn apart by the death of their child, drawn directly from his own marriage’s wounds. His poetry looked pastoral – simple observations about rural life – but delving deeper were tones of loneliness, indecision, the violence of choice, the weight of unspoken grief.
Frost once said: “A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” His poetry began in pain and ended in survival.
In England he was met with critical acclaim. By the time he returned to America in 1915, he was finally recognized. However great the recognition, though, it didn’t stop the suffering. Tragedy continued to follow Frost like a dog. He suffered great loss losing his wife and four of his six children in the ensuing years. How can one survive such loss?
To survive, Frost wrote about woods and walls and roads not taken. His famous poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” ends with the lines:
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
People read it as peaceful. Frost knew it was about the temptation to give up—and the choice to keep going anyway. That’s why his words felt real, like a sanctuary — as the place where you decide whether to continue.
In 1961, Robert Frost was 86 years old. He’d won four Pulitzer Prizes and he was what we would consider our poet laureate. President-elect John F. Kennedy invited him to read at the inauguration. He wrote a new poem specifically for the occasion: “Dedication.” On January 20, 1961. Washington, D.C. it was freezing cold with blinding sunlight. As he stood at the podium before thousands, the paper shook in his hands and he couldn’t see a single word. He squinted and fumbled. What could have been humiliating turned into something remarkable. He lifted his head, set the paper aside, and recited from memory “The Gift Outright”—a poem about America’s creation.
“The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
His voice was steady and strong. He turned what most possibly could have been failure into one of the most moving performances in American political history. He succeeded by adapting when plans failed.
Robert Frost was a survivor who stitched philosophy to grief. His genius wasn’t in prettifying life. It was in telling the truth about it—quietly, simply, in language anyone could understand—while hiding the full weight of his sorrow just beneath the surface.
Four Pulitzer Prizes. Poet Laureate of Vermont. The voice of American poetry for half a century.
He was also a man who buried four of his six children. Who lost the wife he loved. Who battled depression and guilt. Who knew what it meant to want to stop by the woods and not come back.
And who chose, again and again, to keep going. Frost died in 1963 at age 88, just two years after Kennedy’s inauguration. His words remain—not as comfort, exactly, but as companionship.
Frost’s poetry comforts and inspires to all who partake. That’s the beauty of written or spoken words in lyrics, words and poetry – they can uplift, sustain, but used in error, can tear down. That’s the beauty of what makes people succeed – through the hardships they endure. I’m reminded of the importance of what I read, say and do as a result.
What about you?
Tagged: grief and loss, words matter
