"All poetry is a reproduction of the tones of actual speech." - Robert Frost

American poet, Robert Lee Frost was born on March 26, 1874. He was a native of California and lived there until he was 11 years old, although he is commonly associated with New England.

When his father, William Prescott Frost, Jr. died on May 5, 1885, 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 baptised in it, but he left it as an adult.

In spite of his attention to village life depicted in his later works, he lived, at first, in cities and published his first poem in Lawrence high school magazine. He attended Dartmouth College where he was a member of the Theta Delta Chi fraternity. Frost returned home to teach and to work at various jobs including delivering newspapers and factory labour. He sold his first poem My Butterfly for fifteen dollars.

He asked Elinor Miriam White, twice, to marry him and on the second time she agreed and was married in Harvard University. In fact he attended Harvard for two years, but left to support his growing family, in spite of his good performance there.

His grandfather purchased a farm for the young couple in Derry, New Hampshire, shortly before his death.

He worked on this farm for nine years and got up at the break of dawn to write poems, which later became much famous. Their farm did not do so well and he returned to teaching again as an English teacher at Pinkerton Academy from 1906 to 1911, then to the New Hampshire Normal School now known as Plymouth State University.

Frost and his family migrated to Great Britain in 1912 to first live in Glasgow and then Beaconsfield, outside London. His first collection of poetry A Boy's Will was published in 1913.

In England he met a few influential people such as Edward Thomas, a member of the Dymock Poets, T.E. Hulme and Ezra Pound. In fact Pound was the first American to write a positive review to Frost's work. Surrounded by such influential writers Frost wrote some of his best work while in England.

With the beginning of the First World War, Frost returned to America in 1915. He bought a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire and launched a career of writing, teaching, and lecturing.

He was an English professor from 1916 to 1938 at Amherst College, encouraging his students to account for the sounds of the human voice in their craft. He wrote great poems like Stopping by woods on a snowy evening, The road not taken, Out out, etc... that are read and enjoyed by literature lovers to this day.

Frost has received honorary degrees from Harvard, Bates College, Oxford and Cambridge Universities. He was the first to receive two honorary degrees from Dartmouth College. Frost was also given the rare privilege of speaking at the inauguration of a president, when at 86 spoke at the inauguration of President Kennedy on January 20, 1961.

Frost died on January 29, 1963 and was buried at the Old Bennington Cemetery, in Bennington, Vermont.

He frequently used themes from rural life in New England, using the setting to examine complex social and philosophical themes. A popular and often-quoted poet, Frost was honoured frequently during his lifetime.