This week’s October poem selection is by one of our most famous poets - Robert Frost (1874-1963). He is also one of my favorites, since most of his work centers on his realistic depictions of rural life, particularly in New England. Considering that, you may be surprised to learn, as I was, that he was born in San Francisco. After his father’s death when he was eleven, the family moved to Massachusetts to live near his grandfather. He lived in cities in the Northeast before moving to a small farm in Derry, New Hampshire, where he failed at farming but began to excel at poetry. He traveled extensively but always returned to one of the several New England farms he purchased over the years.
John F. Kennedy requested that Mr. Frost recite a poem at his inauguration, but during the ceremony, he was unable to read his own (new) work because of the sun’s reflection on the paper, so he recited by memory “The Gift Outright”, which he had written and published twenty years earlier.
Robert Frost is the only poet to receive four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry and was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by President Kennedy in 1962. Less than a year later he died and was buried at the Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont. On his tombstone is the last line from his poem, “The Lesson for Today” (1942): “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”