It’s the birthday of Robert Frost (1874-1963, #nicelonglife), whose poetry embodied rural New England and the “rough-hewn individuality of the American creative spirit” and who won, frankly, a pant load of Pulitzers (four), more than any other poet.

Frost was born in San Francisco, California, but his journalist father died in 1885 of tuberculosis and his mother moved the family to Lawrence, Massachusetts, so just forget the California bit. Frost fell in love with his high school co-valedictorian, Elinor White, married her in 1895, and had six children with her, four of whom survived childhood; she was his muse until her death in 1938.

Here is Frost’s career in a hearty New England-grown walnut shell: he took a stab at higher learning (first Dartmouth, later Harvard), but it didn’t take; he tried poultry farming but wasn’t great at it; he taught school but not very successfully. Basically the main thing he was good at was poetry, but it took him about 20 years of failure before Ezra Pound helped get Frost’s first volume of poetry published, A Boy’s Will, in 1913, at which point he became famous. Fast. As britannica.com puts it, “Never before had an American poet achieved such rapid fame after such a disheartening delay.” By the 1920s, Frost was considered one of the greatest poets in America. His poetry made money, and he eventually taught at Amherst, Harvard (why graduate from there when you can just teach there?), Dartmouth, and the University of Michigan. Those four Pulitzers were won by his collections New Hampshire: A Poem With Notes and Gracenotes (1924), Collected Poems (1931), A Further Range (1937), and A Witness Tree (1943).

Frost wrote a poem called “The Preface” (later renamed “For John F. Kennedy: His Inaugural”) for Kennedy’s inauguration in 1962. Already 87 years old, Frost was unable to read the poem due to the glare of the sun and the wind ruffling his paper. He finally put it aside and recited from memory “The Gift Outright,” which begins:

The land was ours before we were the land’s.

She was our land more than a hundred years

Before we were her people. She was ours

In Massachusetts, in Virginia,

But we were England’s, still colonials,

Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,

Possessed by what we now no more possessed…

(Read the rest here.)

Have a day absolutely stuffed with rugged American can-do spirit and stay scrupulously honest to the data.