94 Fun Facts About Robert Frost

In which city was Robert Frost born?

San Francisco was home until his father died of tuberculosis, and his mother then moved the family across the country to Massachusetts.

What sent Frost and his family home from England to America?

The First World War sent him home in 1915; he had left without a book to his name, and his second soon became an American best-seller.

In a famous Frost poem, who 'must think it queer' to stop without a farmhouse near?

His horse stands in midwinter snow, yet Frost wrote the poem on a June morning in 1922 after staying up all night over another, longer poem.

Which poem did Robert Frost warn audiences was 'a tricky poem, very tricky'?

The Road Not Taken began as a gentle tease about a friend who always regretted his choice of path, but some read it as praise for bold choices.

Which British poet, an indecisive walking companion, inspired Frost's poem about two diverging roads?

Edward Thomas took the poem personally, and some think it helped tip him into enlisting; he was killed at Arras in 1917.

Before fame came, Frost wrote articles for farm trade journals about raising what?

Poultry farming never paid well, so by 1906 Frost had turned to teaching English to support his growing family.

Frost's poem about pausing beside snowy woods on the darkest evening of the year borrows which verse form?

Edward FitzGerald adopted the form from Omar Khayyam; the poem is in iambic tetrameter.

In which Frost poem does a neighbour twice repeat his father's saying about what makes good neighbours?

Mending Wall's speaker doubts the wall is needed, yet he is the one who calls his neighbour out to rebuild it each spring.

Fire and Ice was reportedly inspired by a passage in which work, where traitors are frozen in the lowest circle of hell?

Astronomer Harlow Shapley also claimed to have inspired it with a talk about how the world will end.

Frost's nine-line poem about how the world will end influenced the title of which fantasy series?

A Song of Ice and Fire was first planned as a trilogy, but George R. R. Martin had published five books by 2011.

Which Frost poem does Ponyboy recite to Johnny in S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders?

Nothing Gold Can Stay echoes after Johnny dies, when his farewell letter urges Ponyboy to 'stay gold'.

Complete Frost's line: 'the best way out is always' what?

Through is a husband's advice to his worn-out farm wife, and in the poem it is no comfort: she agrees only because she can 'see no way out but through'.

What was the original title of Frost's poem about a boy riding bent trees down to the ground?

Swinging Birches drew on Frost's own boyhood, when he climbed and swung on birch trees himself.

Which Frost poem calls home the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in?

The Death of the Hired Man ends when Warren goes in to see the old farmhand Silas and comes back to tell Mary he is dead.

Frost's poem Out, Out, about a boy killed by a buzz saw, takes its title from which Shakespeare play?

Macbeth's 'Out, out, brief candle' mourns how short life is, and Frost's poem ends with the family, not the one dead, turning back to their affairs.

Frost's Acquainted with the Night has fourteen lines like a sonnet but uses which verse form?

Terza rima is especially hard to sustain in languages less rich in rhymes than Italian, the language in which it was invented.

What was the title of Frost's first book of poetry, published in London in 1913?

A Boy's Will found a London publisher after American magazines had kept rejecting his poems.

Which Irish poet called Frost's first book the best poetry written in America for some time?

W. B. Yeats praised it, yet the book had no American edition until Henry Holt brought one out in 1915.

Frost's father named his son after which famous Robert?

Robert E. Lee was the father's hero: a Northerner with Southern sympathies, he had wanted as a youth to join the Confederate army.

Which expatriate American poet reviewed Frost's first two books, though Frost resented his meddling?

Ezra Pound later needed Frost's help: in the late 1950s Frost worked to free him from a federal mental hospital.

What did Frost do with his own copy of Twilight after its cool reception?

Destroyed it: Frost thought he had lost Elinor White, yet she married him the following year.

Frost quit college after less than a term, saying he was needed to take over what?

His mother's unruly class brought him home to teach, and he drifted through odd jobs such as trimming lamps in a woollen mill.

Where was the farm that Frost worked for nine years from 1900?

The Derry farm left Frost a failure as a farmer, yet many poems of his first two books were written there.

Who paid for the farm that Frost and his young family moved to in 1900?

His grandfather's will held back the deed for ten years; once the farm was his, Frost sold it and took his family to England.

Robert Frost's old farmhouse in Franconia is now a museum and poetry centre known as what?

The Frost Place was bought by the town of Franconia in 1976, and in 1977 it began letting an emerging poet live and write there each summer.

At which Massachusetts college did Frost teach on and off from 1917 to 1938?

Amherst saw Frost resign and sell his house there in 1938, after his wife's sudden death.

What did Frost call his colloquial approach to language in poetry?

The sound of sense came from his conviction that the ear is the only true writer and the only true reader of a poem.

Frost famously compared writing free verse to what?

Playing tennis without a net was his jab at free verse; he kept to metre, setting the rhythms of speech against its regular beat.

At which Middlebury College summer school did Frost teach most summers from 1921 to 1962?

Bread Loaf drew Frost back almost every summer for over 40 years, and after his wife's death he bought a farm beside its campus.

Frost, who never finished college, joked that he had been 'educated by' what?

Degrees, that is: more than forty colleges gave him honorary ones, so many that the hoods were stitched into a patchwork quilt.

In which state did Frost spend the winters of his later years?

Florida was where his wife died at their winter home in 1938, yet two years later he bought land near Miami for a new one.

Frost won his first Pulitzer Prize for which 1923 collection?

New Hampshire, despite its title, was partly written across the state line, at the old stone farmhouse Frost bought in 1920.

Frost became Consultant in Poetry, later retitled US Poet Laureate, at which institution?

The Library of Congress post brought him the friendship of Stewart Udall, the congressman who later suggested him for a president's inauguration.

At whose presidential inauguration did Frost recite a poem?

John F. Kennedy's inauguration was the first to feature a poet, and the next year Kennedy sent Frost on a goodwill trip to the Soviet Union.

Why did Frost recite an old poem from memory at the inauguration instead of his new one?

Glaring sunlight kept him from reading his new poem, Dedication, so he recited The Gift Outright and changed its last line to look ahead.

Whom did Frost meet on his 1962 Soviet trip, hoping to mediate between the superpowers?

Nikita Khrushchev met him, but back home a careless remark by Frost undid much of the trip's goodwill.

Which of Frost's own lines is carved on his grave?

I had a lover's quarrel with the world closes The Lesson for Today, where Frost imagines what he would have written of himself on his stone.

Frost was nominated 31 times for which prize but never won it?

The Nobel Prize never came, and in 1961 the jury ruled him out because of his advanced age.

Which college did Frost quit before his first term was over?

Dartmouth lost him before his first term was out, yet half a century later he came back to teach there for six years.

Which award, formally bestowed by Kennedy in March 1962, had Congress voted Frost in 1960?

He also won the Bollingen Prize in 1963 and the Edward MacDowell Medal in 1962.

Which state named Frost its poet laureate in 1961?

Vermont then named no other state poet until 1989, when its governor appointed Galway Kinnell, the first to hold the title since Frost.

Frost shared his high school's valedictorian honours in 1892 with whom?

His future wife, Elinor White, shared the honour, yet when he proposed two years later she made him wait until she had finished college.

In Frost's Home Burial, whose grave does the wife keep looking at from the stair window?

Their child's grave was dug by the husband's own hands, and his wife, who watched from that window, reads it as proof that he does not care.

Frost wrote that a poem 'begins in delight and ends in' what?

Wisdom had to catch the poet unawares too, his 1939 essay argues: 'No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.'

Frost's official biographer, Lawrance Thompson, ended up portraying the poet as what?

A monster of egotism was the picture Thompson's biography left, until later critics such as William Pritchard helped overturn it.

In Frost's poem about two roads diverging, what colour is the wood?

Yellow is the wood, yet the poem admits both roads were worn 'really about the same', so the one he calls less travelled was no such thing.

In Frost's short poem Dust of Snow, which bird shakes snow onto the speaker?

A crow does it from a hemlock tree, and the small shock lifts his mood and saves part of a day he had rued.

Which sport did Frost, at 82, cover for Sports Illustrated?

Baseball was a lifelong passion: Frost had been an amateur pitcher, and he filed his report from the 1956 All-Star Game in Washington.

In Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, where does the owner of the woods live?

In the village, so he will not see the speaker stopping to watch his woods fill up with snow.

Where did Frost travel in Virginia after Elinor White first turned down his marriage proposal?

Elinor wanted to finish college at St. Lawrence University first; they married in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in December 1895.

Which university did Frost attend from 1897 to 1899 before leaving voluntarily because of illness?

Harvard, which he left without a degree, later gave him an honorary doctorate and brought him back to teach in the late 1930s.

Frost's Stone House Museum in Shaftsbury, Vermont, was given to which institution in 2017?

Frost lived in the house throughout the 1920s; it opened to the public in 2002.

In Frost's sonnet Design, a spider, a flower and a moth all share which colour?

White, even the heal-all, which the poem itself calls a 'wayside blue' flower, and the speaker asks what 'design of darkness' brought the three together.

Frost described a poem as 'a momentary stay against' what?

Confusion was what his poems held off, though the gentle farmer-poet on stage hid a troubled, agitated man in private.

In Mending Wall, which neighbour sets up the yearly repair, sending word over the hill to arrange the day?

The one who doubts it is also the organiser: he questions why the wall is needed, yet he sends the invitation and fixes other breaks alone during the year.

In Mending Wall, at what time of year do the two neighbours meet to put the fallen stones back?

Spring is mending time for the pair. The narrator even blames the season for the mischief in him as he teases the man next door.

The narrator of Mending Wall tends an apple orchard, but which trees fill his neighbour's side of the boundary?

Pines grow on the far side, which hands the narrator his best quip: his apple trees, he says, will never cross over and eat the cones.

In Mending Wall, the narrator argues that a fence between farms only makes sense where someone keeps which animals?

Cows might stray and graze another man's pasture, the narrator reasons, but neither farm has any, so he sees nothing for the stones to hold back.

Which mythical creatures does the narrator of Mending Wall think of blaming for the gaps, then decide not to mention?

Elves is the word he almost says, hoping to coax some imagination out of his companion. He holds back because he would rather the man came up with it himself.

What do the two men in Mending Wall use to make the roundest stones stay balanced in place?

A spell is all they try: the wobbliest boulders are simply told not to move until both men have walked on.

In Mending Wall, hunters pull the stones apart to drive which animals out of hiding for their yelping dogs?

Rabbits sheltering among the stones draw the hunters, who leave whole stretches flattened. The narrator calls that damage a different thing from the unseen kind.

How do the two men in Mending Wall position themselves as they walk the boundary replacing fallen stones?

On opposite sides is how they work, each lifting only the stones that fell his way, so the barrier stays between them even while they rebuild it.

In Mending Wall, what does the narrator say swells beneath the stones and tips the top boulders off?

Frozen ground expands as its water turns to ice and lifts the soil. The same swelling can buckle the paving of a road.

The narrator of Mending Wall shrugs off the yearly repair job as just another kind of what?

Outdoor game is his name for it, which suits a man who treats the chore as play and cannot resist teasing his partner as they go.

Which poetic form, the metre of Shakespeare's plays and Paradise Lost, did Frost use for Mending Wall?

Blank verse, unrhymed lines of about ten syllables, sits close to ordinary speech, which let Frost make farm talk sound natural.

Which Frost collection, his second book, first printed Mending Wall alongside Home Burial and After Apple-Picking?

North of Boston came out in London in 1914, and despite the title, not one of its poems is called that.

Frost recalled writing Mending Wall in England in what mood, picturing a boundary he had not repaired in years?

Homesick was Frost's own word: an ocean from his farm, he pictured the old stones, unmended for several years, in a terrible state.

As the other farmer in Mending Wall comes up gripping a rock in each hand, the narrator likens him to what?

An armed savage from the Stone Age is the image, with the rocks doubling as tools and weapons. It shows how primitive the narrator finds an unexamined habit.

Watching the other farmer work under the trees in Mending Wall, the narrator says the man seems to move in what?

Darkness, and not only the shade of the woods: the narrator means a mind that refuses to look behind a saying handed down by a father.

Before building any wall, what does the narrator of Mending Wall say he would first want to know?

What it kept in or out is his test, and he adds a second: whom the barrier might offend, a sly pun, since that word has a fence hiding inside it.

In Mending Wall, the unseen force that topples the boulders opens gaps wide enough for what to pass?

Two people abreast could step through, the narrator notes, yet nobody has ever seen or heard one of these breaks being made.

Which Chinese artist titled a 2017 New York exhibition after the proverb the other farmer repeats in Mending Wall?

Ai Weiwei placed more than 300 works across all five boroughs for the show, which stayed up through the winter of 2017–18.

Frost said Mending Wall picks up a theme of men at work from which poem in his first book?

The Tuft of Flowers celebrates a bond between men who work the same field at different hours; the later poem turns to the distance between two who labour together.

Artist Charles Connick worked the opening line of Mending Wall into which medium for a Massachusetts library in 1939?

Stained glass was Connick's craft, and Frost, a longtime friend, attended the building's dedication to read the poem himself.

In The Road Not Taken, how do the two paths actually compare once the traveller has looked them both over?

Worn about the same, he admits, which is the catch most readers miss: the difference between them is something he only expects to claim years afterwards.

Frost first meant The Road Not Taken as what, aimed at a walking companion who always regretted his chosen route?

A private joke was the plan, but the friend took it to heart, and audiences have heard solemn advice in it ever since.

According to the closing line of The Road Not Taken, what did the traveller's choice of path make?

All the difference, he expects to say, though the poem never reveals whether the change was for better or for worse.

Looking back years later, which path will the traveller in The Road Not Taken claim to have chosen?

The less travelled one is what he expects to claim, in a phrase that now turns up on coffee mugs, fridge magnets and in graduation speeches.

How does the traveller in The Road Not Taken expect to tell the story of his choice far in the future?

With a sigh, he predicts, and readers still argue over whether it signals regret or quiet satisfaction.

What does the traveller in The Road Not Taken say he is sorry about as he first stands at the fork?

He cannot take both and stay a single traveller, so he stands a long while weighing them, a small scene that became shorthand for any hard choice.

What made the second path in The Road Not Taken seem to have the better claim on the traveller?

It was grassy and looked in want of feet, which the traveller took as a sign that fewer walkers had come that way.

After saving the first path for another day, what does the traveller in The Road Not Taken admit to himself?

He may never come back, because each turning tends to lead on to the next, a thought that makes a woodland stroll stand for a whole life.

In The Road Not Taken, what lies over both paths that no walker's feet have yet trodden black?

Fallen leaves lie fresh on both, and their not being darkened tells the traveller that nobody has come through since they dropped.

Why can the traveller in The Road Not Taken see only part of the way down the first path?

It bends out of sight in the undergrowth, so he has to choose on partial evidence, the predicament the whole poem turns on.

Which author borrowed a phrase from The Road Not Taken to title his 1978 bestseller on love and spiritual growth?

M. Scott Peck's publisher printed just 5,000 copies at first, and the book reached the bestseller lists only years later, after he worked the lecture circuit.

The Road Not Taken is the opening poem of which Frost collection, his third book of poems?

Mountain Interval arrived in 1916, a year after the poem's magazine debut, and Frost placed this piece ahead of everything else in the book.

Which American magazine first printed The Road Not Taken in August 1915, months before it appeared in a book?

The Atlantic Monthly ran it in a group of Frost poems, and the text changed slightly before the book version: one word and one punctuation mark.

The Road Not Taken is built from four stanzas of five lines each; what is a stanza of that length called?

A quintain is the unit, and the four of them track the decision in stages: weighing, choosing, second-guessing and finally retelling.

The friend who inspired The Road Not Taken soon enlisted and was killed in 1917 on the first day of which battle?

Arras began at Easter 1917, and he had been in France for little more than two months when he fell.

Which rhyme scheme does Frost repeat through all four five-line stanzas of The Road Not Taken?

ABAAB keeps the second line waiting until the fifth for its partner, an unusual pattern that is sometimes listed under this poem's own name.

Which metre does Frost use loosely in The Road Not Taken, often swapping in a three-syllable foot?

Iambic tetrameter gives each line four rising beats, but most lines here run to nine syllables because an anapest slips in, which keeps the voice conversational.

In which English county did Frost take the 1914 country walks with a fellow poet that led to The Road Not Taken?

Gloucestershire was home to Frost's cottage, Little Iddens, and the pair walked without a map, steering by the sun or a distant hill.

Which American band recorded the 1972 song All This Is That, partly inspired by The Road Not Taken?

The Beach Boys' Al Jardine said he read the poem on a little road above his Big Sur home, then blended it with ideas from Transcendental Meditation.

What did critic David Orr call The Road Not Taken in the title of a 2015 Paris Review essay?

The most misread poem in America was Orr's verdict, and he went on to publish a whole book about a work only twenty lines long.