Robert Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874. When Frost was a young man, his father died, causing the family to move to Massachusetts. Frost attended Dartmouth College for less than a semester, after which he moved back to Massachusetts to teach and work as a reporter for a local newspaper. Frost returned to college in 1897 to attend Harvard, but he did not graduate. Frost was essentially a self-educated man.

After Harvard, Frost married and sold the farm he had inherited. With the proceeds of the sale, he moved his family to England, where he wrote for ten years without success. His first works were published by a London publisher in 1913.

Frost's works, once printed, met immediate acclaim. His collection of poems A Further Place won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. Though he is sometimes cast as a pastoral poet, Frost was also a fierce intellectual with a decidedly dark view of himself and the world. Frost would use rural settings as a metaphor for his philosophical views. Robert Frost is one of the best-known and most loved of American poets. He died in Boston on January 29, 1963.

Two of Frost's poems are included below. Click the sound icon located next to each poem's title to download a sound clip of the poem. The sound files are 383K and 181K in size.

Fire and Ice	Devotion
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.	The heart can think of no devotion Greater than being shore to the ocean— Holding the curve of one position, Counting an endless repetition.