10 Famous Poems by Robert Frost

Robert Frost and His Famous Poems - Robert Frost holds a unique and almost isolated position in American letters. In a sense, Frost stands at the crossroads of 19th-century American poetry and modernism, for in his verse may be found the culmination of many 19th-century tendencies and traditions as well as parallels to the works of his 20th-century contemporaries. Taking his symbols from the public domain, Frost developed, as many critics note, an original, modern idiom and a sense of directness and economy that reflect the imagism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. 

Childhood
Robert Frost was born to journalist father William Prescott Frost, Jr. and mother Isabelle Moodie. After William’s death in May 1885, the family moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Education

In 1982, Robert Frost graduated from Lawrence High School. Frost's mother joined the Swedenborgian church and had him baptized in it, but he left it as an adult. Frost grew up in the city, and he published his first poem in his high school's magazine.

Career

In 1894 he sold his first poem, "My Butterfly An Elegy" to the New York Independent for $15. From 1906 to 1911, he joined New Hampshire's Pinkerton Academy as an English teacher and later joined New Hampshire Normal School in Plymouth, New Hampshire. In 1912, Frost sailed with his family to Great Britain, in a small town outside London. In 1913 his first book of poetry “A Boy's Will” got published and “North of Boston” in 1914.
With the start of World War I, Robert Frost returned to America in 1915 and settled in New Hampshire. From 1916 onwards he joined Amherst College in Massachusetts as a teacher in English and became active in writing career. His noted work “West Running Brook”, “The Gold Hesperidee”, “From Snow to Snow” and much more came during this period.

Awards and Honors

Robert Frost received his first Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for “New Hampshire”, followed by in 1931 for Collected Poems, in 1937 for “A Further Range” and in 1943 for “A Witness Tree”. In 1960, he received the United States Congressional Gold Medal for "In recognition of his poetry” which enabled the culture of the United States and the philosophy of the world.

At the End

He became one of America's rare "public literary figures, almost an artistic institution. On 29th January, 1963, he died in Boston, of complications from prostate surgery. He was buried at the Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont.

You can read 10 famous poems by Robert Frost here:

The Road Not Taken

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.


Fire And Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.

From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.


Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.


A Question

A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.


The Times Table

More than halfway up the pass
Was a spring with a broken drinking glass,
And whether the farmer drank or not
His mare was sure to observe the spot
By cramping the wheel on a water-bar,
turning her forehead with a star,
And straining her ribs for a monster sigh;
To which the farmer would make reply,
'A sigh for every so many breath,
And for every so many sigh a death.

That's what I always tell my wife
Is the multiplication table of life.'
The saying may be ever so true;
But it's just the kind of a thing that you
Nor I, nor nobody else may say,
Unless our purpose is doing harm,
And then I know of no better way
To close a road, abandon a farm,
Reduce the births of the human race,
And bring back nature in people's place.


An Empty Threat

I stay;

But it isn't as if
There wasn't always Hudson's Bay
And the fur trade,
A small skiff
And a paddle blade.

I can just see my tent pegged,
And me on the floor,
Cross-legged,
And a trapper looking in at the door
With furs to sell.

His name's Joe,
Alias John,
And between what he doesn't know
And won't tell
About where Henry Hudson's gone,
I can't say he's much help;
But we get on.

The seal yelp
On an ice cake.

It's not men by some mistake?
No,
There's not a soul
For a windbreak
Between me and the North Pole—
Except always John-Joe,
My French Indian Esquimaux,
And he's off setting traps
In one himself perhaps.

Give a headshake
Over so much bay
Thrown away
In snow and mist
That doesn't exist,
I was going to say,
For God, man, or beast's sake,
Yet does perhaps for all three.

Don't ask Joe
What it is to him.

It's sometimes dim
What it is to me,
Unless it be
It's the old captain's dark fate
Who failed to find or force a strait
In its two-thousand-mile coast;
And his crew left him where be failed,
And nothing came of all be sailed.

t's to say, 'You and I—'
To such a ghost—
You and I
Off here
With the dead race of the Great Auk!'
And, 'Better defeat almost,
If seen clear,
Than life's victories of doubt
That need endless talk-talk
To make them out.'


A Winter Eden

A winter garden in an alder swamp,

Where conies now come out to sun and romp,
As near a paradise as it can be
And not melt snow or start a dormant tree.

It lifts existence on a plane of snow
One level higher than the earth below,
One level nearer heaven overhead,
And last year's berries shining scarlet red.

It lifts a gaunt luxuriating beast
Where he can stretch and hold his highest feat
On some wild apple tree's young tender bark,
What well may prove the year's high girdle mark.

So near to paradise all pairing ends:
Here loveless birds now flock as winter friends,
Content with bud-inspecting. They presume
To say which buds are leaf and which are bloom.

A feather-hammer gives a double knock.

This Eden day is done at two o'clock.
An hour of winter day might seem too short
To make it worth life's while to wake and sport.


The Door In The Dark

In going from room to room in the dark,

I reached out blindly to save my face,
But neglected, however lightly, to lace
My fingers and close my arms in an arc.

A slim door got in past my guard,
And hit me a blow in the head so hard
I had my native simile jarred.
So people and things don't pair any more
With what they used to pair with before.


In A Poem

The sentencing goes blithely on its way
And takes the playfully objected rhyme
As surely as it takes the stroke and time
In having its undeviable say.


Love And A Question

A stranger came to the door at eve,
And he spoke the bridegroom fair.
He bore a green-white stick in his hand,
And, for all burden, care.

He asked with the eyes more than the lips
For a shelter for the night,
And he turned and looked at the road afar
Without a window light.

The bridegroom came forth into the porch
With, 'Let us look at the sky,
And question what of the night to be,
Stranger, you and I.'

The woodbine leaves littered the yard,
The woodbine berries were blue,
Autumn, yes, winter was in the wind;
'Stranger, I wish I knew.'

Within, the bride in the dusk alone
Bent over the open fire,
Her face rose-red with the glowing coal
And the thought of the heart's desire.

The bridegroom looked at the weary road,
Yet saw but her within,
And wished her heart in a case of gold
And pinned with a silver pin.

The bridegroom thought it little to give
A dole of bread, a purse,
A heartfelt prayer for the poor of God,
Or for the rich a curse;

But whether or not a man was asked
To mar the love of two
By harboring woe in the bridal house,
The bridegroom wished he knew.