Almanac of Story Tellers: Robert Frost

 Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of March 26th

 ___________________________________________________________________________

    It is the 85th day of the year, leaving 280 days remaining in 2022.

   

    On this date in 1874, the poet Robert Frost was born in San Francisco.

    He was one of America's best-loved poets, a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and the first poet to read his work at the inauguration of a U.S. president, which he did for John F. Kennedy in 1961.

    Even though he was born in California, Frost and his poetry became synonymous with New England rural life. When his father died shortly after Frost's 11th birthday, the family moved across the country to Lawrence, Mass. He attended Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and lived there and in Vermont for most of his life.

    His poetry reflected his mostly rural lifestyle, written in a colloquial Amercrican voice, and putting ordinary New Englanders in ordinary situations, using them to examine a myriad of social and philosophical themes.

    Frost's writings originally were not popular, and he published few poems while farming and teaching in New Hampshire. So in 1912, he moved to England, where he found a more receptive audience. There, he published several books of poetry. The second one, North of Boston, contained some of his best early work, including Mending Wall, which soon became a topic of reference in debates about nationalism, borders, and immigration.

    Like much of Frost's work, it presents arguments on several sides. Its opening line is, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," and then describes how nature will tear one apart. In the middle, Frost says, "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know/ What I was walling in or walling out."

    But the poem ends with the oft-quoted line, "Good fences make good neighbors."

    When North of Boston was published in the United States as Frost returned in 1915 during World War I, he found the book was a best seller. He went on to publish more poems and books, winning several awards, and began teaching at major universities.

    In 1960, President-elect Kennedy asked Frost to read one of his poems at his inauguration, Frost instead wrote a new poem for the event. But he could not read the new work in the sun and the glare, so performed another poem from memory.

    Frost died a few years later, in 1963 in Boston.