Frost

The creator, the artist, the extraordinary [person], is merely the ordinary [person] intensified: a person whose life is sometimes lifted to a high pitch of feeling and who has the gift of making others share their excitement. The ordinary [person] lives by the creative spirit. [They] think in images and dreams in fantasty; [they] live by poetry. Yet they seem to distrust it. [They] cling to the notion that a poet is a queer and incompetent creature, a daydreaming ne'er-do-well, an eccentric trying to escape the business of the veryday world, a soft and coddled soul.

Almost the opposite is true. History is the record of [people] who were not only poets but workers, [beings] of action, discoverers, dreamers and doers...

[A]ny account of Robert Frost's life must being with its curious contradictions. Descended from a long line of New Engalnders who were rooted in the region since 1632, Frost was born in California. The most American of poets, he was first recognized not in his own country, but abroad, and his first two books were published in England. He has never entered a competition and does not believe in prize contests, yet the Pulitzer Prize for the best poetry of the year has been awarded to him four times.

Robert Frost's ancestors were Scotch-English. His mother was of a Scottish seafaring family of Orkneyan origin, a scho0olteacher whose name appears in most records as Isabelle Moody. Frost was more than fifty when he learned the correct spelling from a distant cousin in New Zealand; the relation from down under informed him that the proper spelling was "Moodie." A few years later the poet acknoledged the correction in a poem which serves as "mottoe" for A Witness Tree, a poem playfully signed "The Moodie Forester."

-Excerpt from Louis Untermeyer's introduction to "New Enlarged Pocket Anthology of Robert Frost's Poems"