Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco, California, on March 26, 1874 and
was the son of William Prescott Frost and Isabelle Moodie Frost. After his
father died in 1885, the family returned to Lawrence, Massachusetts, which was
the home of Frost’s grandparents. There he grew up through his high school
years. After less than a year at Dartmouth College, he left to work in textile
mill and to marry Elinor White, a high school classmate. When his academic
experience at Harvard disappointed him, Frost returned to Lawrence and had a
variety of jobs. Finally, he became a chicken farmer in Derry, New Hampshire, on
property that he bought from his grandfather. In 1912, Frost took his family to
England, hoping that the residence there would help advance his poetic career. A
British publisher accepted his first two volumes of verse, A Boy’s Will (1913)
and North of Boston (1914). Both were published in the United States in 1915,
the year the Frost family returned him and settled on a farm in Franconia, New
Hampshire. He then became a summer farmer and poet-teacher, just like he was in
Derry. Except for brief periods at the University of Michigan and Harvard, he
spent his academic years 1916-1963 mainly at Amherst College. Meanwhile, as he
was finishing the poem collection New Hampshire (1923), he decided that most of
his living should be done in Vermont, where he helped create and sustain the
Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English.
Frost’s eventual poetic success was counter-pointed by much personal grief and
loss. Several of the Frost children were stillborn or died in infancy - they are
remembered in the poem Home Burial. Frost’s son committed suicide and his
daughter became insane. After his wife’s death in 1938, the poet lived either
alone or with friends. He died in Boston on January 29, 1963. Frost kept his
religious faith mostly to himself or confided it only to close friends (Smith).
When it entered his poetry at all, it was usually in a very guarded fashion.
Earlier poems such as Sitting by a Bush in Broad Daylight and Not All There
imply religious attitudes, and later ones - A Masque of Mercy, Accidentally on
Purpose, and Kitty Hawk - are explicitly religious. The “dark” poems -
Spring Pools, A Leaf Trader, Design and The Draft Horse - expressing tragic
moods rather than hard-won convictions, and the poems of endurance, like
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, seem more deeply felt and more perfectly
executed. And it seems Frost knew instinctively that they would have more appeal
in a naturalistic age. Robert Frost, an established American poet, lived to
become his country’s unofficial poet laureate. He won the Pulitzer Prize for
poetry four times and was awarded the Bollingen Prize posthumously. The U.S.
Senate honored him on his 75th and 85th birthdays, and he had a prominent part
in the inauguration ceremony for President John F. Kennedy in 1961, speaking the
poem The Gift Outright, which he had written for the occasion. The poem,
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, is about a man, or the author, that was
going through his hectic life and than all the sudden, one evening, he actually
stopped to look at his surroundings. He realized how beautiful his life and this
world was and that sometimes there’s too much going on to enjoy this. This
poem is a metaphor for life. So many people are involved in so many things that
they can never enjoy what’s happening right now in their lives. The author
sits for a minute, studies his surroundings for once and then realizes that
there is too much to do to just sit there. He finishes the poem by saying,
“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.” This is the part where
he comes back to his senses and realizes that he can’t just sit there, that he
must return to the real world and finish what has to be done in life before he
can actually stop. The reason I picked this poem is because I can completely
relate to it. Sometimes, in life, I have so many things going on (school,
social, sports) that I never get a chance to just stop and take in my
surroundings. Then, when I finally do get a chance to slow down and enjoy
everything, I realize that I must keep going: that I have to push on and on
until my goals are achieved and I can finally “sleep”.