Robert Frost and “The Road Not Taken”

In 1912, poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) and his family moved to England. His writing career was not happening in the United States, and a flip of a coin made the decision for England instead of Canada. He was in England for only a short time when a British publisher offered a contract. The resulting book caught the attention of a British poet and literary journalist, Edward Thomas, and Frost and Thomas became good friends.

They often took walks in the countryside together, and Frost was often amused by his friend’s indecision as to which walking route to take, and then to regret the one chosen. Frost later sent Thomas a poem, entitled “Two Roads,” which Frost thought of as a kind of joke about Thomas’s indecision and a parody on the romantic imagination. For his part, Thomas seemed not to realize it was meant as a joke, and took it quite seriously, as the exchange of letters between the two indicates.

Thomas eventually enlisted in the British Army, and died in 1917 in France. Today he’s known as one of the “World War I poets.” Frost went on to become, more than anyone else, the “American Poet.” And his poem, “Two Roads,” was renamed, and became “The Road Not Taken,” perhaps the best known American poem of the 20^th century, and perhaps the best known American poem, period.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Robert Frost about the time he wrote “The Road Not Taken.”

Poets and Poems: Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

When I was in junior high and high school, there was one poem that had managed to find its way into all of the textbooks for American literature: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost. I don’t think I ever heard from a teacher (or read in a textbook) anything about the context of the poem, but context didn’t matter. American poetry meant Robert Frost, and Robert Frost meant “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

If that poem alone wasn’t enough, a second Frost poem sealed the contract: “The Road Not Taken.” For tens of millions of Baby Boomers, Robert Frost, and these two poems in particular, were our first definition of poetry. (One American literature teacher I had in high school had us read Frost first, and then start at the chronological beginning.)

I don’t know if “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is still included in textbooks today; probably not, since it implies the existence of God and schools can be rather ruthless about such subjects. But it was an enormously influential poem, and even Frost considered it that way, having told fellow poet Louis Untermeyer (who was poet laureate consultant to the Library of Congress in 1961) that the poem was “my best bid for remembrance.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.