Ποιειν Και Πραττειν - create and do

1874 - 1884

Frost's boyhood years in San Franciso

1885

Moves to Lawrence, Massachusetts with mother and sister

1886

Year of Emily Dickinson's death

1887

Year of Walt Whitman's death

Frost graduates from Lawrence High School. His valedictory address refers to the poet: his „varied heart beats“ and his „converse with nature.“

Attends Dartmouth for less than one semster: from 1897 – 99 he was to attend Harvard as a special student, but he never gained an earned degree. Eventually he was to be awarded over 40 honorary degrees.

1894

His first published poem, „My Butterfly“

„Sidelong, full on my cheek,

What should that reckless zephyr fling

But the wild touch of the dye-dusty wing...“

1894 - 1913

Period during which Frost is struggling for recognition.

1895

Marries Elinor White

He would declare and could himself believe

That the birds there in all the garden round

From having heard the daylong voice of Eve

Had added to their own an oversound,

Her tone of meaning but without the words.

Admittedly an eloquence so soft

Could only have had an influence on birds

When call or laughter carried it aloft.

Be that as may be, she was in their song.

Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed

Had now persisted in the woods so long

That probably it never would be lost.

Never again would birds' song be the same.

And to do that to birds was why she came.

From A Witness Tree, 1943

That was the voice Frost was developing, but it was as yet unheard - „walled out,“ to borrow a phrase from a poem he wrote in that first period.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper shoulders in the sun...

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out ...

1912 - 1915

Frost family in England

1913 David Nutt & Co., England, publises A Boy's Will

Erza Pound praises Frost in review.

1914 North of Boston published in England.

1915

The return to the United States and growing recognition.

1915 American publication of first two books.

1916 Elected to National Institute of Arts and Letters

1917, Professor of English, Amherst

1918 Honorary MA, Amherst – later, honorary degrees from Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge etc.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

They have to take you in...

A Boy's will

1920 - 1950

Frost's reputation grows in the United States and the world.

1931 The collected poems (Pulitzer Prize)

Frost – the figure of the poem, and the figure of the man:

...it should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The fiture is the same as for love...

Robert Frost, „The Figure a Poem makes“

1938

Elinor Frost's death

1940

Death of son Carol Frost by suicide

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain...and back in rain.

I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.

I have passed by the watchman on his beat

And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry

Came over houses from another street...

-----

And...

One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong or right.

I have been one acquainted with the night.

- West Running Brook, 1928

1950 - 1963

The national poet and the global ambassador...

1957 Honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge

1961 Visits Greece and the Hellenic-American Union (22 March)

1961 Reads „The Gift Outright“ at Kennedy's Inauguration

1962 In Moscow reads „Mending Wall“ and meets Khrushchev

1963 Awarded the Bollingen Prize of the Library of Congress

January 29 dies at the age of 88

Robert Frost: „something like a star“

O Star (the fairest one in sight),

We grant your loftiness the right

To some obscurity of cloud...

It will not do to say of night,

Some mystery becomes the proof.

But to be wholly taciturn

In your reserve is not allowed.

Say something to us we can learn

By heart and when alone repeat,

Say something' and it says 'I burn'...

It give us strangely little aid,

But does tell something in the end.

And steadfast as Keats' Eremits.

Not even stooping from its sphere,

It asks of us a certain height,

So when at times the mob is swayed

To carry praise or blame too far,

We make take something like a star

Tos tay our minds on and be staid.

A Witness Tree 1942