Frost penned first poem while at Lawrence High

The late American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) is most often associated 
with the tranquility of rural New England, but he received his early education 
at a gritty inner city high school. Frost wrote his first poem, “La Noche Triste,” 
when he was a sophomore at Lawrence High School. He was inspired after verse and prose 
written by a fellow classmate, Carl Burell, was published in the “High School Bulletin.”
He then decided he might try his hand at some poetry.
	
“The lines just came to my head walking home from school,” Frost recalled. 
Once he reached his grandmother’s house, he sat down at the kitchen table and 
penned an account of a horrible night of Spaniards in retreat after a bitter 
battle during the “Conquest of Mexico”. The Bulletin published the poem.

Frost, his mother and sister lived a in a poor section of Lawrence. 
Family finances became so wretched in 1890 that the family moved to Ocean 
Park, Maine, where his mother was a hotel chambermaid and Frost gathered mail 
and mowed lawns to help with family finances. His only recreation was tennis.

Frost attended Dartmouth and Harvard, but graduated from neither. Years 
later, both awarded him honorary degrees. He won four Pulitzer prizes for 
poetry, in 1924, 1931, 1937 and 1941. He is often remembered for his recital 
from memory of the poem “The Gift Outright.” at John F. Kennedy’s presidential 
inauguration in 1961.

He was born in San Francisco to a newspaper editor and his Scottish 
wife. After his father died, the family moved to Lawrence under the patronage of his 
paternal grandfather, an overseer at a mill. Frost spent most of his adult 
years in Vermont and New Hampshire. He was a longtime teacher at Amherst 
College and at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont.

His personal life was filled with personal tragedy. His younger sister 
was committed to a mental hospital where she died. Four of Frost’s children 
died prematurely, one of who committed suicide. His mother and his wife 
suffered from depression.

Frost is buried at the Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vt. His 
epitaph reads, “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

-- Leo Chabot