The global icon of the untamed New England wilderness was born a city boy in San Francisco in 1874, and he had to move his family to England to convince anyone he was a great American writer. This episode dismantles the grandfatherly rustic myth around Robert Frost to reveal a life defined by an eight-dollar inheritance, grueling factory work maintaining carbon arc lamps, nine years of failing at poultry farming in Derry, New Hampshire, and a massive 1912 gamble that finally got his first collections published to acclaim in Britain.

We explore his clash with Ezra Pound over free verse, his philosophy that rigid poetic structure is the only thing strong enough to bear the weight of grief, and the staggering catalog of loss he carried: four of six children dead before him, a sister and daughter institutionalized, and the death of his wife Eleanor in 1938. The conversation also covers his four Pulitzer Prizes, the 1961 Kennedy inauguration where sun glare forced him to recite from memory, and his 1962 meeting with Nikita Khrushchev at the height of the Cold War.

• How the death of his father left the family with exactly eight dollars and sent them across the country
• Why British editors embraced the plain colloquial voice that American gatekeepers dismissed as uneducated
• The suspension bridge analogy for why he despised free verse and insisted on traditional meter
• How critics shifted from reading his work as folksy wisdom to recognizing existential terror
• His influence on The Outsiders, A Song of Ice and Fire, and pop punk, plus the epitaph describing a lifelong dispute with the world