Robert Frost, the quintessential poet of New England, was born in San Francisco in 1874. He was educated at Dartmouth College and Harvard University. Although he managed to support himself working solely as a poet for most of his life and holding various posts with a number of universities, as a young man he was employed as a bobbin boy in a mill, a cobbler, a schoolteacher, and a farmer. Frost, whose poetry focuses on natural images of New England, received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times for: New Hampshire, Collected Poems, A Further Range, and A Witness Tree. His works are noted for combining characteristics of both romanticism and modernism. He also wrote A Boy's Will, North of… Boston, Mountain Interval, and The Gift Outright, among others. Frost married Elinor Miriam White in 1895, and they had six children--Elliott, Lesley, Carol, Irma, Marjorie, and Elinor Bettina. He died in Boston in 1963.
Rachel Wetzsteon was born in Manhattan, New York on November 25, 1967. She received a bachelor's degree from Yale University, a master's degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. She taught for numerous years at the Unterberg Poetry Center. Her poetry primarily examined the solitary yet defiant lives of single women. She published three volumes of poetry: The Other Stars; Home and Away; and Sakura Park. She also wrote Influential Ghosts, which is a study of W. H. Auden. Her work appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New Republic, and The Nation. She was the poetry editor of The New Republic and was on the faculty… of William Paterson University. She committed suicide on December 25, 2009.