Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
60 free Robert Frost trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Robert Frost trivia quiz covers America's most honoured poet, from a San Francisco childhood most people forget to a reading in the glare of John F. Kennedy's inauguration. The easy questions are ones anyone who met Frost in school can attempt: the poem about two roads, the woods that are lovely, dark and deep, the neighbour who says good fences make good neighbours, how many Pulitzers he won and which state he is identified with. From there it moves through the life: Lawrence, Dartmouth for two months, the Derry farm, the years in England, A Boy's Will and North of Boston, Amherst, Bread Loaf and Vermont. The harder end is for poetry lovers: Edward Thomas and the real road not taken, the Rubaiyat stanza of Stopping by Woods, Dante and Harlow Shapley behind Fire and Ice, terza rima in Acquainted with the Night, the Macbeth echo in Out, Out, the sound of sense, tennis without a net, his 31 Nobel nominations, the Congressional Gold Medal, the trip to meet Khrushchev, the epitaph about a lover's quarrel with the world and Nothing Gold Can Stay's afterlife in The Outsiders. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on Frost, his poems and his places before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our famous poets, American literature and 20th-century poetry quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Robert Frost born in 1874?
San Francisco
Although known for rural New England, he grew up in the city until his family moved east after his father died.
Q 02How many Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry did Frost win, a record?
Four
They came for New Hampshire, Collected Poems, A Further Range and A Witness Tree.
Q 03Which region's rural life is Frost most associated with?
New England
He used its settings to examine complex social and philosophical themes.
Q 04Frost's poem about two roads diverging in a yellow wood is called what?
The Road Not Taken
It first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1915 and opened the collection Mountain Interval.
Q 05Which English poet, an indecisive walking companion, inspired Frost's most famous poem about two diverging roads?
Edward Thomas
He was killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917 soon after arriving in France.
Q 06Which Frost poem ends with the speaker having miles to go before he sleeps?
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Justin Trudeau adapted the stanza in his eulogy for his father in 2000.
Q 07Frost's poem about pausing beside snowy woods on the darkest evening of the year borrows which verse form?
The Rubaiyat
Edward FitzGerald adopted the form from Omar Khayyam; the poem is in iambic tetrameter.
Q 08In which Frost poem does a neighbour twice say Good fences make good neighbours?
Mending Wall
The speaker twice observes that something there is that doesn't love a wall.
Q 09Fire and Ice was reportedly inspired by a passage in which work, where traitors are frozen in the lowest circle of hell?
Dante's Inferno
Astronomer Harlow Shapley also claimed to have inspired it with a talk about how the world will end.
Q 10Frost's nine-line poem about how the world will end influenced the title of which fantasy series?
A Song of Ice and Fire
The poem is also the epigraph of Stephenie Meyer's Eclipse.
Q 11Which Frost poem does Ponyboy recite to Johnny in S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders?
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Johnny later quotes a stanza back to him in a letter read after his death.
Q 12In which magazine was Frost's eight-line poem about Eden sinking to grief first published in 1923?
The Yale Review
It came out in October of that year and was collected in New Hampshire.
Q 13What was the original title of Frost's poem about a boy riding bent trees down to the ground?
Swinging Birches
Classicist Helen Bacon links its bent-tree imagery to Euripides' Bacchae.
Q 21Frost sold his first poem, My Butterfly, in 1894 to The Independent for how much?
$15
He promptly proposed to Elinor White, who made him wait until she finished college.
Q 22How long did Frost last at college in 1892 before returning home to teach and work odd jobs?
Two months
It was long enough to join Theta Delta Chi; he later attended Harvard for two years but never graduated.
Q 23Where was the farm that Frost's grandfather bought for him, which he worked for nine years?
Derry, New Hampshire
He wrote early in the mornings there and produced many poems that later became famous.
Q 14Which Frost poem contains the line Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in?
The Death of the Hired Man
Warren wrestles with the idea as he and Mary discuss the returning hired man Silas.
Q 15Frost's poem Out, Out, about a boy killed by a buzz saw, takes its title from which Shakespeare play?
Macbeth
The saw is described as snarling and leaping like a living creature.
Q 16Acquainted with the Night has fourteen lines like a sonnet but uses which rhyme scheme?
Terza rima
The pattern runs ABA BCB CDC DAD AA in strict iambic pentameter.
Q 17What was the title of Frost's first book of poetry, published in London in 1913?
A Boy's Will
Ezra Pound became the first American to review Frost favourably.
Q 18Which London publisher issued both A Boy's Will and North of Boston?
David Nutt
Holt brought out the American editions.
Q 19In which English town did Frost first settle when he sailed to Britain in 1912?
Beaconsfield
He later mixed with the Dymock poets in Gloucestershire.
Q 20Which American poet was the first to review Frost favourably, though Frost later resented his interference?
Ezra Pound
Frost resented Pound's attempts to manipulate his American prosody.
Q 24At which academy in Derry did Frost teach English from 1906 to 1911 after his farming failed?
Pinkerton
He then taught at the New Hampshire Normal School in Plymouth.
Q 25The poet's summer home in Franconia became a museum and poetry centre known as what?
The Frost Place
It served as the family's summer home until 1938.
Q 26At which Massachusetts college did Frost teach on and off from 1917 to 1938?
Amherst
He urged students to capture the sounds and intonations of spoken English, his sound of sense.
Q 27What did Frost call his colloquial approach to language in poetry?
The sound of sense
He believed traditional metre freed him to concentrate on content.
Q 28Frost famously compared writing free verse to what?
Playing tennis without a net
He stuck to traditional forms while American poetry drifted toward free verse.
Q 29At which Middlebury College summer school did Frost teach most summers from 1921 to 1962?
Bread Loaf
The college owns his nearby Ripton farmstead, a National Historic Landmark.
Q 30Which institution gave Frost a lifetime appointment as Fellow in Letters in the 1920s?
Michigan
His Ann Arbor house was later moved to Greenfield Village at the Henry Ford Museum.