Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
~ The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
Born in San Francisco 150 years ago, Robert Frost moved to New England ten years later upon the death of his father, and in effect remained there for the rest of his life, becoming the “poet of New England” par excellence. Yet his early life was not notably successful. Frost’s first book of poems was published only when he was 40, but with grit and a passion for words, he would go on to win a record four Pulitzer Prizes and become the most famous poet of his time.
Frost’s position in American literature was cemented with the publication of his poetry collection, North of Boston (1914), and in the years before his death he came to be considered the unofficial poet laureate of the United States. On his 75th birthday, the US Senate passed a resolution in his honor which said, “His poems have helped to guide American thought and humor and wisdom, setting forth to minds a reliable representation of ourselves and of all men.”
Frost’s poetic practice was marked by what he called “sentence sounds” that endowed his poems with lyrical sensitivity and pleasure to readers. As one commenter once said, his poetry “plays a deeper music and gives a more intricate variety of experiences.”
Frost’s poetry often attend to a combination of Emersonian spiritual aspiration in nature, with a back-country pragmatism that gives voice to human anguish with force. This is most evident in two of his most famous poems, The Road Not Taken (1915) and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1922). In the first poem, the reader is led to a fork in a woodland path for which he must choose one path, and his fate, forever sealed by that choice. In the second poem, written with perfect lyric, a speaker stops his sleigh in the middle of a snowy woods only to be reminded by the chilly gloom of his list of unfulfilled practical duties.
Watch
Former President, John F. Kennedy’s tribute to Robert Frost and the Power of Poetry.
Robert Frost reading his poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.