While a number of worthy poets have served as the United States Poet Laureate, few are well known by much of the country's population. Robert Frost is likely the only one among them to be a household name in the United States. People who have never read his poetry have heard of him. This is possibly due to his great gift with American colloquial speech. More Americans are able to identify with his work than that of some other poets.

He was born in San Francisco, California to journalist William Prescott Frost, Jr., and Isabelle Moodie. His father's family had early seventeenth-century roots in New Hampshire. From an early age, Frost was able to take advantage of two circumstances that would help form him as a poet. First, his earliest years were spent in a family that valued education, and encouraged their son in his writing pursuits. Second, he spent time as a young child in a peaceful, rural setting, which he regularly invokes in his poetry.

Personal tragedy also informed his development as a poet. His father died from tuberculosis in 1885, when Robert was only eleven years old. Young Robert and his mother and siblings moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where his grandfather, William Frost provided the family a home. When he graduated high school he enrolled briefly at Dartmouth College, but lasted only two months. He returned home to teach and work odd jobs. None of these satisfied him, and he longed to pursue the life of a poet.

To cope with the dullness of his workaday world, Frost wrote in his spare time. His first poem, "My Butterfly: An Elegy," was published in a local newspaper when he was twenty years old. So confident was he for his future prospects as a poet, he proposed marriage to a young woman named Elinor Miriam White. She turned him down, stating she wanted to finish college first. Once she completed her studies, the couple married. The wedding venue was Harvard University, where Frost spent two years studying liberal arts.

The couple had six children, Elliot (who died from cholera as a child), daughter Lesley, son Carol (who committed suicide at age thirty-eight), Irma, Marjorie (who died of childbed fever at age twenty-nine), and Elinor Bettina (who died only three days after her birth). He was a good student, but as the couple started their family, he left college and moved his family to a small farm purchased for them by his grandfather. His love and association of the rural returned again to his life and began to inform his poetry.

While his poetry improved, his farming skills were decidedly lacking, and he returned to teaching at the New Hampshire Normal School (now Plymouth State University). Several years later he packed up his family and sailed to England, where he settled outside of London. His first book of poetry, A Boy's Will, was published there the following year.

Frost made a number of important literary connections during his English stay, including befriending members of the Dymock Poets, T.E. Hulme, and Ezra Pound. According to some experts, Frost wrote some of his best poetry while he was in England. When World War I started, Foster and his family returned to the United States, and bought a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire. It was here that he launched his long-term career of writing, teaching, and lecturing. Today the home is a museum and poetry conference site.

Frost taught English at Amherst College, Massachusetts, where he was a popular professor. He encouraged his students to listen and account for the sounds of the human voice in their writing. Beginning in 1921 until 1963 Frost spent nearly every summer teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College in Vermont. During the rest of the year he taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Tragedy touched his life again in 1938, when his wife, who had lifelong heart problems, developed breast cancer and died of heart failure. Later in life he bought a small acreage in Florida, where he wintered for the rest of his life. Although Frost never graduated from college, he was the recipient of more than forty honorary degrees, including from Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge Universities. He was the recipient of many awards, most notably Pulitzer Prizes in 1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943. He was named Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress for 1958-1959.

On January 20, 1961, at the age of eighty-six, he spoke and performed at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. When he died two years later, the epitaph placed on his tombstone reads, "I had a lover's quarrel with the world."