60 Fun Facts About Robert Frost

In which city was Robert Frost born in 1874?

Although known for rural New England, he grew up in the city until his family moved east after his father died.

How many Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry did Frost win, a record?

They came for New Hampshire, Collected Poems, A Further Range and A Witness Tree.

Which region's rural life is Frost most associated with?

He used its settings to examine complex social and philosophical themes.

Frost's poem about two roads diverging in a yellow wood is called what?

It first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1915 and opened the collection Mountain Interval.

Which English poet, an indecisive walking companion, inspired Frost's most famous poem about two diverging roads?

He was killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917 soon after arriving in France.

Which Frost poem ends with the speaker having miles to go before he sleeps?

Justin Trudeau adapted the stanza in his eulogy for his father in 2000.

Frost's poem about pausing beside snowy woods on the darkest evening of the year borrows which verse form?

Edward FitzGerald adopted the form from Omar Khayyam; the poem is in iambic tetrameter.

In which Frost poem does a neighbour twice say Good fences make good neighbours?

The speaker twice observes that something there is that doesn't love a wall.

Fire and Ice was reportedly inspired by a passage in which work, where traitors are frozen in the lowest circle of hell?

Astronomer Harlow Shapley also claimed to have inspired it with a talk about how the world will end.

Frost's nine-line poem about how the world will end influenced the title of which fantasy series?

The poem is also the epigraph of Stephenie Meyer's Eclipse.

Which Frost poem does Ponyboy recite to Johnny in S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders?

Johnny later quotes a stanza back to him in a letter read after his death.

In which magazine was Frost's eight-line poem about Eden sinking to grief first published in 1923?

It came out in October of that year and was collected in New Hampshire.

What was the original title of Frost's poem about a boy riding bent trees down to the ground?

Classicist Helen Bacon links its bent-tree imagery to Euripides' Bacchae.

Which Frost poem contains the line Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in?

Warren wrestles with the idea as he and Mary discuss the returning hired man Silas.

Frost's poem Out, Out, about a boy killed by a buzz saw, takes its title from which Shakespeare play?

The saw is described as snarling and leaping like a living creature.

Acquainted with the Night has fourteen lines like a sonnet but uses which rhyme scheme?

The pattern runs ABA BCB CDC DAD AA in strict iambic pentameter.

What was the title of Frost's first book of poetry, published in London in 1913?

Ezra Pound became the first American to review Frost favourably.

Which London publisher issued both A Boy's Will and North of Boston?

Holt brought out the American editions.

In which English town did Frost first settle when he sailed to Britain in 1912?

He later mixed with the Dymock poets in Gloucestershire.

Which American poet was the first to review Frost favourably, though Frost later resented his interference?

Frost resented Pound's attempts to manipulate his American prosody.

Frost sold his first poem, My Butterfly, in 1894 to The Independent for how much?

He promptly proposed to Elinor White, who made him wait until she finished college.

How long did Frost last at college in 1892 before returning home to teach and work odd jobs?

It was long enough to join Theta Delta Chi; he later attended Harvard for two years but never graduated.

Where was the farm that Frost's grandfather bought for him, which he worked for nine years?

He wrote early in the mornings there and produced many poems that later became famous.

At which academy in Derry did Frost teach English from 1906 to 1911 after his farming failed?

He then taught at the New Hampshire Normal School in Plymouth.

The poet's summer home in Franconia became a museum and poetry centre known as what?

It served as the family's summer home until 1938.

At which Massachusetts college did Frost teach on and off from 1917 to 1938?

He urged students to capture the sounds and intonations of spoken English, his sound of sense.

What did Frost call his colloquial approach to language in poetry?

He believed traditional metre freed him to concentrate on content.

Frost famously compared writing free verse to what?

He stuck to traditional forms while American poetry drifted toward free verse.

At which Middlebury College summer school did Frost teach most summers from 1921 to 1962?

The college owns his nearby Ripton farmstead, a National Historic Landmark.

Which institution gave Frost a lifetime appointment as Fellow in Letters in the 1920s?

His Ann Arbor house was later moved to Greenfield Village at the Henry Ford Museum.

What did Frost name his five-acre Florida winter property, because he never made a penny without one?

He wintered in South Miami from 1940 for the rest of his life.

Frost won his first Pulitzer for a 1923 collection with what full title?

It contained Fire and Ice, Nothing Gold Can Stay and Stopping by Woods.

In which year was Frost named Consultant in Poetry, retitled US Poet Laureate in 1986?

Librarian of Congress Lawrence Quincy Mumford named him; Richard Eberhart succeeded him a year later.

At whose presidential inauguration did Frost read in January 1961?

He was 86 years old.

Why did Frost recite The Gift Outright from memory at the inauguration instead of the poem he had written for the day?

The poem he had composed for the occasion was called Dedication.

Whom did Frost hope to meet on his 1962 trip to the Soviet Union with Interior Secretary Stewart Udall?

He wanted to lobby for peaceful relations between the two Cold War powers.

What is Frost's epitaph, taken from his poem The Lesson for Today?

He is buried in the Old Bennington Cemetery in Vermont.

Frost died in January 1963 at what age?

He died at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston and was buried in Bennington, Vermont.

How many times was Frost nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature without winning?

He did receive more than 40 honorary degrees, including from Oxford and Cambridge.

Frost is the only person to have received two honorary degrees from which institution?

Dartmouth also holds the most significant collection of his working manuscripts.

Which award, formally bestowed by Kennedy in March 1962, had Congress voted Frost in 1960?

He also won the Bollingen Prize in 1963 and the Edward MacDowell Medal in 1962.

Which state named Frost its poet laureate by legislative resolution in 1961?

The Vermont State League of Women's Clubs had already elected him poet laureate in 1922.

Frost and his wife Elinor were co-valedictorians in 1892 at the high school of which Massachusetts mill town?

He published his first poem in the school magazine and served as class poet.

How many children did Robert and Elinor Frost have?

Only Lesley and Irma outlived their father; the family was plagued by grief and mental illness.

Which critic's essays, including To the Laodiceans, defended Frost against charges of being too traditional and revealed a darker poet?

He called Frost, with Stevens and Eliot, the greatest American poet of the century.

Whose three-volume biography, completed in 1977, suggested Frost was a much nastier piece of work than anyone had imagined?

Critics such as Pritchard and Bloom later helped rehabilitate him as a bleak modernist.

Which Wallace Stegner novel takes its title from Frost's poem I Could Give All to Time?

Nehru, meanwhile, kept a book of Frost at his bedside as he lay dying.

Frost's mother joined which denomination and had him baptised in it?

He left it as an adult.

Frost's father died in 1885 leaving the family how much money?

He had been an editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin and died of tuberculosis.

The Poetry Society of America's annual award for lifetime achievement, named for the poet, takes what form?

It should not be confused with the gold medal Congress gave Frost himself.

Which reporter, signing off after JFK's casket arrived at the White House in 1963, broke down quoting Stopping by Woods?

Frost was one of Kennedy's favourite poets.

Frost's father edited which San Francisco newspaper before his death in 1885?

The paper later merged with the San Francisco Examiner; Frost's father also ran unsuccessfully for city tax collector.

Where did Frost travel in Virginia after Elinor White first turned down his marriage proposal?

Elinor wanted to finish college at St. Lawrence University first; they married in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in December 1895.

Which university did Frost attend from 1897 to 1899 before leaving voluntarily because of illness?

He never graduated from college but later received over 40 honorary degrees, including from Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge.

Edward Thomas, Frost's friend in England, belonged to which literary group?

Frost also met T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound there after arriving in 1912.

Frost's Ann Arbor home was relocated to which museum's Greenfield Village for public tours?

He held a fellowship at the University of Michigan from 1921 to 1927, which made him a lifetime Fellow in Letters.

Frost's Stone House Museum in Shaftsbury, Vermont, was given to which institution in 2017?

Frost lived in the house throughout the 1920s; it opened to the public in 2002.

Who succeeded Frost as US Poet Laureate after his one-year term ending in 1959?

Frost had been appointed by Librarian of Congress Lawrence Quincy Mumford.

Which Frost collection did critic T. K. Whipple call 'his harshest book'?

Whipple said it emphasised the dark background of rural New England life 'with its degeneration often sinking into total madness'.

Which Frost poem is the epigraph of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight novel Eclipse?

Bella Swan also reads it at the start of the 2010 film; the same poem inspired Baron Quinn's recital in Into the Badlands.