Robert Frost drifted through a string of occupations after leaving school, working as a teacher, as a cobbler, and as the editor of the Lawrence Sentinel. His first published poem, “My Butterfly," appeared on November 8, 1894, in the New York newspaper the Independent.
By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length collections, A Boy’s Will (Henry Holt & Co., 1913) and North of Boston (Henry Holt & Co., 1914), and his reputation was established. By the 1920s, he was the most celebrated poet in America, and with each new book -including New Hampshire (Henry Holt & Co., 1923), A Further Range (Henry Holt & Co., 1936), Steeple Bush (Henry Holt & Co., 1947), and In the Clearing (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1962)- his fame and honors (including four Pulitzer Prizes) increased. Though his work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England - and though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his time - Frost is anything but merely a regional poet. The author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes, he is a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony.