Frost is the only poet with four poetry Pulitzers
Robert Frost (26 March 1874 – 29 January 1963) turned New England speech into philosophical drama and remains the only poet to win four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. At eighty-six, sunlight blinded his inaugural page for Kennedy, so he recited “The Gift Outright” from memory instead.
San Francisco–born to journalist William Prescott Frost Jr. and Scottish immigrant Isabelle Moodie, he moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts, after his father’s 1885 death left the family with eight dollars. High-school co-valedictorian with future wife Elinor White, he sold “My Butterfly. An Elegy” for fifteen dollars in 1894, then married her on 19 December 1895. Dartmouth lasted two months; Harvard (1897–99) ended with illness. A grandfather’s Derry, New Hampshire, farm yielded nine lean farming years and dawn poems before Pinkerton Academy teaching. In 1912 the family sailed to Beaconsfield, England; A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914) won him Edward Thomas, Pound, and Hulme—Pound’s early praise later soured when Frost resisted prosodic meddling. “The Road Not Taken” grew from Thomas’s walks.
Returning in 1915, he farmed Franconia, taught Amherst with his “sound of sense” credo, and nearly every summer from 1921 to 1962 shaped Middlebury’s Bread Loaf. Four poetry Pulitzers followed: New Hampshire in 1923, then the 1930 collected volume, the 1936 Further Range, and 1942’s Witness Tree. Named U.S. Poet Laureate in 1958 and Vermont’s in 1961, he received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960. Winters at Pencil Pines in South Miami—named because he said he never earned a penny without a pencil—balanced Vermont and Cambridge homes.
Grief shadowed the public rustic: children’s deaths, sister and daughter committed for mental illness, Elinor’s death in 1938. Randall Jarrell defended a darker Frost behind the homespun mask; Harold Bloom ranked him among major American poets. Epitaph from “The Lesson for Today”: “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”
Source: Robert Frost
