Robert Frost

Robert Lee Frost was born March 26, 1874, and spent decades writing verse that used the rhythms of actual speech to examine what happened between people in rural New England settings. The work earned him four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry, the only poet to receive that many, and made him what one critic called "one of America's rare public literary figures, almost an artistic institution." In 1958 he was appointed United States Poet Laureate; in 1960 he received the Congressional Gold Medal; in 1961 Vermont named him its poet laureate. Randall Jarrell placed him alongside Stevens and Eliot as the greatest American poets of the century, crediting him with a knowledge of ordinary people few poets ever had. Frost himself said poetry had to surprise the writer to surprise the reader - "a revelation, or a series of revelations" built on the freedom of material to establish relations "regardless of time and space, previous relation, and everything but affinity." He died January 29, 1963.