Robert Frost (1874-1963), the best known American poet of the 20th century, is regarded as the poet of New England, the rural north-east of the United States where he lived almost permanently from the age of 11 until his death.
Before starting his career as a creative writer he worked at a mill in Massachusetts and later tried to lead what he would call an alternative way of life. But his efforts to live self-sufficiently on a farm in New Hampshire with his wife and several children failed. The family sold the farm in 1912 and moved to England (1912-15) where Robert Frost quickly found a publisher for his first collection of poems (A Boy's Will, 1913). The publication of 'North of Boston' a year later was the second step on his way to a success which was to last for the rest of his life. Frost became the most widely-read American poet and is still among the few modern writers whose lines are remembered by heart by thousands of people. Frost was rewarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, 1930, 1936 and 1942. On January 20, 1961, he was invited to recite one of his poems at J.F. Kennedy's inauguration ('The Gift Outright: The land was ours before we were the land's...').
Frost's work is sometimes seen as merely a collection of beautiful country poems. But behind the light rural scenes that his writings evoke there is also the longing for the dark (Stopping by Woods..) and the hint at existential fears: These, obviously, are not country poems in the usual sense - certainly not pastoral poems. What they have to say about country things - snow, scything, meadow flowers - turns out to be something very different: something about man, about the experience of being human, being alive, on this little sun-struck, wind-worn planet that will also end.