Robert Francis
August 12, 1901
Upland, Pennsylvania, U.S.
July 13, 1987 (aged 85)
Upland, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Poet
American
Shelley Memorial Award (1939)
Life[edit]
Robert Francis was born on August 12, 1901, in Upland, Pennsylvania.[1] He graduated from Harvard University in 1923. He would later attend the Graduate School of Education at Harvard where he once said that he felt that he'd come home. He lived in a small house he had built for himself in 1940, which he called Fort Juniper, near Cushman Village in Amherst, Massachusetts. Francis chose to name his home "Fort Juniper" since juniper is nearly indestructible. His main poetic mentor was Robert Frost, and indeed Francis's first volume of poems, Stand Here With Me (1936), displays a poetic voice reminiscent of Frost's own in carefully crafted nature poems. However, his second book of poetry Valhalla and Other Poems was awarded with the 1939 Shelley Memorial Award.[2] Frost once said: "poetry is the only acceptable way to say one thing and mean another."
Later work[edit]
Francis published very little during the 1940s and 1950s. He decided that "for better or worse, I was a poet and there was really nothing else for me to do but go on being a poet. It was too late to change even if I had wanted to. Poetry was my most central, intense and inwardly rewarding experience."[2] In 1960, Francis published The Orb Weaver, which revived his reputation as a poet.
Francis uses hidden meanings in his poems, which suggest another way that Frost made an impression on Francis's poetry. In later volumes, Francis found a voice distinctively his own, relaxed in meter and characterized by puns, word-plays, slant rhymes, and repetitions of key words. Aside from one long narrative poem in Frostian blank verse, Francis's poetry consists largely of concise lyrics, somewhat limited in thematic range but intensely crafted and deeply personal. Frost would later say that Robert Francis was America's best neglected poet. His poems often regard nature, and exhibit a distinct imagistic quality to them in representing the essence of the natural world. Also, the poems he wrote about baseball are perennial classics in that they are memorable. His autobiography, The Trouble with Francis, was published in 1971 and details his struggle with neglect.[2] Francis died July 13, 1987, in Upland, Pennsylvania.
Awards[edit]
Francis won the Shelley Memorial Award in 1939. In 1984 the Academy of American Poets gave Francis its award for distinguished poetic achievement.[2]