The Writer’s Almanac – MARCH 21 – 27, 2005
It’s the birthday of poet Robert Frost, born in San Francisco (1874). His journalist father died of tuberculosis when young Robert was 11. His mother, who had $8 in the bank, had to take her young children back East and rely on the good will of the father’s family. Frost went off to Harvard, but dropped out when he learned that he might have TB. He became a poultry farmer, but had a run of bad luck: his son Elliot, not quite 4 years old, died of typhoid fever. Frost blamed himself for it; he said the death was like “murdering his own child.” Then, when the woman who owned the farm stopped by to see if she could collect some rent from him, she found chickens wandering everywhere, the house filthy, with dishes unwashed, and unswept floors. The next day she sent Frost an eviction letter. But then his mother-in-law stepped in and found his family a farm in southeastern New Hampshire, where they spent the next 11 years, during which he wrote many of his best poems. He wrote a friend later: “To a large extent the terrain of my poetry is the Derry landscape, the Derry farm. There was something about the experience which stayed in my mind, and was tapped for poetry in the years that came after.”