Robert Lee Frost (named by his father, a New England Democrat, after the Confederate general) was born in San Francisco on 26 March, 1875. His father was a New Hampshire man whose ancestors for eight generations had lived in New England. He, however, had become a school-teacher in Pennsylvania, where he had married a Scotchwoman born in Edinburgh, and later had gone to San Francisco, where he edited a Democratic newspaper. When Mr. Frost was ten years old his father died, and he and his mother came east to Lawrence, Massachusetts, to live with the boy's grandfather, who was an overseer in a mill there. Here Mr. Frost lived until 1897, attending the public schools and completing the high-school course, going to Dartmouth College for a few months in the autumn of 1893, but soon leaving upon finding that he learned nothing and only wasted his time-becoming a millhand, and, in 1895, marrying Miss Elinor White, of Lawrence. In 1897 he went to Cambridge and studied at Harvard College for two years, but found it uphill and not altogether profitable work and, at the end of that time, abandoned the hope of obtaining a college degree. (He has since received a number of honorary degrees). He had begun writing poetry at the age of fifteen, and had gone through a period of reading and discipleship which began with Poe and included Shakespeare, Christina Rossetti, E. R. Sill, Bryant, and others. In 1892 he had begun sending poems to periodicals, and had soon been rewarded by The Independent's acceptance of one, but this piece of good fortune was not quickly followed by another. Mr. Frost's heart, however, was in his poetry and he kept on writing verse and sending it to periodicals for a period of twenty years, with only the rarest success, with no appreciable profit, and with no public recognition. Meanwhile he had somehow to support his growing family. For a time after he left Cambridge he was a shoemaker, then a school-teacher, and then the editor of a small paper. Finally his grandfather, in 1900, purchased for him a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, and there he struggled, not very successfully, to make a living, until 1912. From 1905 until 1911 he taught English in the Pinkerton Academy, at Derry. In 1911-1912 he taught psychology at the New Hampshire State Normal School in Plymouth. In the latter year an opportunity came to dispose of his farm, and with the proceeds he and his family sailed for England (September, 1912), determining, wisely as it happened, to let the future take care of itself.

In England Mr. Frost found an active interest in poetry, and soon found what he had not been able to find in America-a publisher. In 1913 A Boy's Will appeared in London, and was at once heartily welcomed, and its author recognized as a significant and genuine new poet. In the following year, after Mr. Frost had leased a small farm where he had Lascelles Abercrombie and Wilfrid Wilson Gibson for near neighbors, his second volume, North of Boston, was published in London, in which he more than made good the promise of his earlier book and, indeed, firmly established himself as one of the finest and truest poets of our age. His fame now began to extend to America and, in addition, the War changed conditions of life in England and made it desirable for him to bring his family back to the United States. He returned in the spring of 1915, and in the same year his two volumes were republished here. He went to live near Franconia, New Hampshire, and in 1916 published Mountain Interval. From 1916 to 1919 he taught English at Amherst College, but, finding it impossible to combine professorial and creative work, he resigned his post and bought a farm in Vermont. He had not much more than become settled there, however, when he accepted an invitation to become a resident member of the faculty of the University of Michigan, without specific duties. In 1923 he returned for two years to Amherst, but has now gone back to Michigan, and divides his time between Ann Arbor and his Vermont farm. His fourth and most recent volume of verse, New Hampshire, was published in 1923, and won the Pulitzer Prize for that year.

Mr. Frost does not write in "free verse," but carries on the central tradition of the English language in poetry, writing in conventional lyric measures and in blank verse. In the latter, it is true, he permits himself to use a considerable amount of freedom; nevertheless, in the matter of form his achievement, like Mr. Robinson's, consists not in invention, but in remarkably successful adaptation, by which means he has developed a verse and a style which seem perfectly to express him and which are wholly his own. He has made himself peculiarly the poet of New England hills and farms and their people. It is a remarkable fact that neither the city in which he was born nor the city in which he grew to manhood has furnished him with any matter for poetry, nor did his three years in England. But the remote

New England countryside is his own, and he has portrayed its repressed, decaying, and hopeless people, hovering on the edge of madness, with a strange, quiet intensity and truthfulness which is unique and memorable. He is a faithful realist, but, as he himself has pointed out, there is more than one kind of realism: "There are two types of realist-the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real one; and the one who is satisfied with his potato brushed clean. . . . To me the thing that art does for life is to strip it to form." Mr. Frost deals with only a small portion of life, but that portion he knows completely and handles as a consummate artist, subtly suggesting through his pictures the life which to him is life, in contrast with the realities of both town and country in this industrial, mechanized age. It is necessary, for a full understanding of his work, always to remember that he has called himself a "synecdochist" (one who puts a part for the whole), and that he has said: “I was brought up a Swedenborgian. I am not a Swedenborgian now. But there's a good deal of it that's left with me. I am a mystic. I believe in symbols."

We wear our fingers rough with handling "When was I ever anything but kind to him? them.