Robert Frost (1874-1963) was a well known poet and literature professor, teaching at Amherst College (1917), the University of Michigan (1922), the University of Vermont (1923), Yale University (1923), Middlebury College (1924), and Bowdoin College (1926). He received his first Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes; he received other Pulitzers Prizes for Collected Poems (1931), A Further Range (1937), and A Witness Tree (1943). One of his most famous poems, “The Road Less Traveled” (1916) has become the text to many choral arrangements, the most famous in the cycle Frostiana, written by the composer Randell Thompson.

Frost taught at the New School in 1931; The Bounds of Poetry comprised of ten lectures. Instead of being a general analysis of poetry, Frost’s lecture series inquired into the process that poets undertake in writing poems. It focused on a poem’s inspiration, spiritual connections, and musical elements. Frost also was a part of a lecture reading event at the New School on November 30, 1937.

Frost became the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (1958-59), received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960, and was also a speaker at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, reciting his poem “The Gift Outright.”