Life & Background
Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874 and moved to New England at eleven after his father's death, a region he adopted so completely that readers forget he was a westerner. He dropped out of Dartmouth and Harvard, worked as a teacher, cobbler, and farmer in New Hampshire, and could not get published in America. In 1912 he sold the farm and moved his family to England, where he met Ezra Pound and Edward Thomas and published his first two collections; he returned in 1915 to find himself famous. His personal life was marked by extraordinary loss — four of his six children died before him, and his wife Elinor's death in 1938 was followed by his son's suicide two years later. He won four Pulitzer Prizes and read at Kennedy's inauguration in 1961, by then a national institution. He died in 1963.
The Road Not Taken
A traveller comes to a fork in a wood in autumn and is sorry he cannot take both paths. He looks down one as far as he can, then takes the other, calling it perhaps the better claim because it is grassy and wants wear — before immediately correcting himself: the passing there had worn them really about the same, and both lay equally in leaves no step had trodden black. He keeps the first for another day while knowing he will not come back. The last stanza projects forward: he says that ages and ages hence he will be telling this with a sigh, that he took the road less travelled by, and that it made all the difference.
The poem is the most misread in American literature, and the misreading is built into it. The speaker states plainly that the two roads were worn about the same, then predicts that he will one day tell the story differently — so the closing lines are not a celebration of nonconformity but a forecast of how people retrofit meaning onto arbitrary choice. Frost wrote it in gentle mockery of Edward Thomas, who was given to sighing over paths not taken, and was irritated when readers took it straight. The technique is characteristic: plain diction, conversational rhythm inside strict metre, a rural surface, and a dark or ironic centre — what Frost meant by calling a poem a momentary stay against confusion, and what Lionel Trilling meant by describing him, to the audience's discomfort, as a terrifying poet.
Why Frost Matters
Frost held to metre and rhyme through the modernist decades — he compared free verse to playing tennis with the net down — and demonstrated that traditional form could carry modern psychological complexity. His poems are the most quoted and most misquoted in American verse, which makes him a useful case in the difference between popularity and reading. Design, Home Burial, Mending Wall, and Stopping by Woods are standard examination texts, and the gap between his public image and the bleakness of the work is a recurring question.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- A Boy's Will1913
- North of Boston1914
- Mountain Interval1916
- New Hampshire1923
- West-Running Brook1928
- A Further Range1936
- The Witness Tree1942