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Frost has been standing people off all his life—the family who wanted him to become a lawyer, the editor who wanted him to change his style, the scientists who told him man is an accident of atoms, the theologians who told him that man is in a hopeless fix.
Though Robert Frost's paternal ancestors have been New Englanders for eight generations, the man who speaks with the voice of New England was born in exile—a continent's width away in San Francisco.* His father, a brilliant, erratic rebel who graduated high in his class at Harvard, had run away from a law career to edit a San Francisco newspaper, and became a Republican-hating Democrat. Frost remembers his father as "a wild man" who gave him many a whipping, remembers eating many of his lunches in saloons while his father talked politics at the bar. Young Robert was nervous, could not sleep, suffered from biliousness and scrofula, was more often out of school than in. "I wasn't considered a very good bet," he says.
His mother, an orphaned immigrant from Scotland, was brought up by a wealthy uncle in Ohio. Well-educated and an earnest supporter of Henry George's single tax (George was a close family friend), Isabella Frost tried to fill the gaps in her son's erratic education, reading him poetry and Scottish history.
Hole in the Bucket. When he was eleven, his father died of tuberculosis, leaving the family penniless. His mother brought Robert and his sister (two years younger) back to New England. Grandfather Frost, an overseer in a Lawrence, Mass, woolen mill, received them without enthusiasm. "We were the hole in the bucket," says Frost. His mother went to work teaching school, and young Robert trudged to high school in his grandfather's cut-down suit. He worked in the mills, nailed shoes, helped farmers. He began to read Latin and Greek avidly, wrote his first poem (in blank verse, about Cortes in Mexico), played on the football team and tied for class honors with a girl named Elinor Miriam White.
While Elinor went to college, young Robert restlessly tried Dartmouth for a couple of months ("A great fellow for poking fun," a classmate remembers), went back home, tried editing a weekly and wrote a column in the Lawrence Sun-American. He sold his first poem (My Butterfly) to the Independent, and a check for $20 arrived from New York along with a lady editor eager to take him back for lionizing. He refused to go. He was only 20, but even then he had learned when to stand people off.
Frost and Elinor White were married in 1895. A woman of competence and quiet charm, Elinor managed the money and her impractical husband, listened to his poems. Two years after their marriage,