The Road not Taken

I mentioned last week that I would check to see if I was related to Robert Frost or Robert Burns. I meant it as a joke, but as the week progressed, I decided I would follow up on the idea, including another couple of famous poets, W.B. Yeats and John Keats while I was at it. 

As I've said before, if you broaden your search beyond direct ancestors -- your great and great-to-the-X grandparents, the chances you are related to someone famous multiply greatly, and some of the genealogy sites make the search pretty easy. Give them enough information to pinpoint the person you're looking for, click an icon, and voila, the information pops up. 

The program I use won't identify relations beyond 15 generations, but you can still go back pretty far. I ran the four men I cited above and found that our family is related to two of them -- Yeats, who married a 10th cousin, three times removed, and Frost, a 6th cousin, three times removed. I'll skip which side of the family is related to which poet.

Plenty could be written about both men, but for this post, I chose Robert Frost because he is closer in time and his history overlaps ours -- he died in the 1960 -- and because even if younger people today don't know who he is, they almost certainly have heard lines from some of his most famous works -- "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," "Good fences make good neighbors," (both of which I've heard evoked during the current border wall disputes), or "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --/ I took the one less traveled by, /And that has made all the difference."

I bring those lines up because I've heard them so much that once a few years ago I looked them up. I couldn't remember the entire poems and thought I should reread them. I did, and so should you, several times. You might find they have little to do with whatever you think they mean.

Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874 and lived there until his father died when he was 11. His father was from Lawrence, Mass., and wanted to be buried there. After transporting him to his final resting place, Frost's mother relocated the family to the state, leading to Frost becoming a quintessential New England icon.

Strangely, Frost used to lie about his birth date, claiming he'd been born a year later. He'd somehow become convinced his mother was pregnant before marrying his father and thought he'd spare his mother some grief by claiming to have been born later. He later found out he was mistaken and gave up the deception. 

He graduated from Lawrence (Mass.) High School and shared valedictory honors with the woman he would marry, Elinor Miriam White. Two years after graduation, he published his first poem, "My Butterfly: an Elegy," but struggled to find acceptance for much of his work in America. 

His grandfather had purchased and given Frost and his wife a farm after their marriage. By some accounts Frost was an indifferent farmer, preferring to spend his time writing. His frustration at his lack of success with publishing his work in this country led him to sell the farm and move his family to England, where he believed, correctly, his work would find an audience. 

There he made friends with English poets and published his first compendium, which was a great success. After three years in England, he returned to the States in 1915. A friend of his had arranged to have his first book and a second work published here before his return, and these books established his reputation. By the 1920s he was America's pre-eminent poet. 

He racked up an impressive list of accomplishments during his life, receiving four Pulitzers for poetry, which I believe is the most for any American poet. Only two other authors have won that many in any genres, Eugene O'Neill for drama and Robert E. Sherwood for drama and biography. 

Despite having never graduated from college, although he attended Dartmouth and Harvard, he taught at a number of prestigious universities. Both his attempts at college were interrupted by the need to find employment to support his family.

Though we're used to poets reading their works at presidential inaugurations, Frost was the first to do so, reciting one of his works at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. He had written an original poem for the occasion, but couldn't read his copy in the strong sunlight that day. He substituted "The Gift Outright," which Kennedy had requested, and recited it from memory. 

Frost died at the age of 88 in 1963 after complications from prostate surgery.

Next time we'll look at the curious history of Frost's "Road Not Taken." Hint: It was written to tweak an indecisive friend.

 Image: Robert Frost, U.S. Consultant in Poetry, 1958-1959. Library of Congress. World-Telegram photo by F. Palumbo. Retrieved from loc.gov