Robert Frost has always been a great walker. One of his poems, "A Record Stride," tells how he wet one shoe in the Pacific and one in the Atlantic while taking care of two different grandchildren. It is not extravagant to say that Making Poems for America shows how one man took a record stride indeed, encompassing his own land and its people, and pulling them into his heart, his humor, and his wisdom.
Robert Frost's poetry is full of surprises, as his readers have come to know. And his life his been full of surprises, too.
Born in San Francisco, he became originally and primarily the poet of New England. Although he quit Dartmouth College as a student before the end of his first semester and left Harvard after less than two years and never took a degree, he ultimately became a faculty member at Dartmouth. Harvard elected him to the Board of Overseers, the University's governing body. Averse as he was to colleges in his youth, he later taught at half a dozen, and has "said" his poems at scores of institutions of higher learning throughout the United States.
Frost achieved virtually no success in his native land until in 1915 he returned from England where he had published his first two books. He returned to America to find himself famous. Never so much as a candidate for public office, Frost in his 80's became a friend of senators, representatives, cabinet members, and other Washington officials when he was Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress. President John F. Kennedy invited him to "say" one of his poems at the Inauguration in 1961.
The thread of consistency that binds these surprises together into whole cloth is Frost's confidence in himself. He knew that he would be a poet when he was in high school. He predicted that it might take 20 years for him to be recognized, but he never doubted that recognition would come.
Frost startled American readers and critics by "being new in old ways." He became a great and original teacher, in school and out, but always in his own way. Later he became a national symbol, journeying not only the length and breadth of the United States, but to Brazil and Israel. Everywhere he is considered a symbol of America. Always he is himself.
—from the dust jacket
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