Robert Frost was not immediately famous; it took him many years of writing poetry to get any notoriety. In fact, when he turned 40 years old, he still had not had a book of his poems published. (He had, however, had several individual poems printed.) By profession, he worked for a while as a teacher and another time as a farmer (among other things). He was rejected by many American publishers and eventually moved to England with his family, where he had more works published. While there, he also met famous poets such as Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, and Ezra Pound. All of these men encouraged Frost in his writing. Ezra Pound greatly appreciated Frost's poetry and gave him positive literary reviews and encouragement. Frost and his family returned to America when WWI started. Thankfully, some of the positive reviews that he received in England profited his writing career in America, as well.

One of his great accomplishments was being asked to present a poem for John F. Kennedy's presidential inauguration; Frost was 86 years old at this time. (He read the poem "The Gift Outright," which he modified slightly for the occasion.) Frost's poems are known for their lyrical wordings and their spoken beauty.

Robert Frost did not follow any specific poetic schools or movements. He was known, however, for the sincerity and individuality of his descriptions. Amy Lowell, another American poet, wrote that he "goes his own way, regardless of anyone else's rules."

Lowell grew to love Frost's poetry and was instrumental in seeking American publishers for his work. Robert Frost sought a unique and individual voice. Still, some people classify his style as being closely in line with the Modernism movement. His poems had a freshness of style; his wordings were unique and different. Still, Frost valued elements of the traditional poetic styles, as well. William H. Pritchard showed how Frost stood "apart from the modernist work of his famous contemporaries—Eliot, Pound, Stevens—his own poetry, in its complication of tone and its delicate balancing of gravity and wit."

Frost's poems were a blend of topics both serious and light/humorous. His style was unique to his own works. He influenced future poets by showing the freeness of poetic voice. He showed others that they did not need to mirror the style of another writer. This idea continues to impact modern writers.

His style clearly differed from the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century; this is especially seen in Frost's mixed view of nature. Frost often showed the sadness and struggles in nature. This is especially seen in his works "Out, Out" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Romantic poetry, however, typically focused on the beauty and splendor of nature. However, both Frost and the Romantic poets incorporated beautiful sounds (or lyricism) that was created from common words. Frost's poems incorporated both light and cheerful topics and sad, difficult, or tragic topics. His poetic style was wholly unique.

Evaluating the influence of Robert Frost is difficult because, although his work is superb, and distinctive, it doesn’t have the strong and immediately obvious stylistic hallmarks one finds in e.e. cummings, Ginsberg, Dylan Thomas, or T.S. Eliot, that make influence immediately recognizable, nor was Frost particularly involved in the literary politics of the modernist school.
Perhaps his strongest influence was to keep alive an anti-modernist, formalist, and regionalist strain in American poetry, which in various ways influenced the southern Fugitive poets and later the growth of New Formalism, which follows many of Frost’s choices of formal meter, ordinary speech, narrative structure, and popular appeal.

Frost was also deeply connected to the Georgian movement in Britain, and especially influenced Edward Thomas.