Robert Frost

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874, but after his father died when Frost was only 11, his familiy moved to Massachusetts. Although he eventually enrolled at Dartmouth and later Harvard, he never finished his college degree but worked at random jobs and ran a farm. He moved to England with his wife for a brief period, where he secured his success as a poet and then moved his family back to New Hampshire where he bought a farm. In his life, he was awarded 4 Pulitzer Prizes and was the first poet ever to read at a presidential inauguration; that of John F. Kennedy. He died in 1963. Paschen & Mosby's Poetry Speaks, pg. 48.

I love his poems. He has so many wonderful poems, but most people remember him for "The Road Not Taken." If you read it closely, the lines "And both that morning equally lay/In leaves no step had trodden black" reveal that both roads were "less traveled" and the point of the poem isn't that the speaker took the "higher road" as so many fans of this poem would have us believe; the point is that he took a road, which essentially communicates the theme that indecisiveness in life over which road to take may in fact lead you to regret time wasted in not deciding and that action is what leads to difference. My favorite poems by Frost are "The Oven Bird," and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." This beautiful book illustrated by Susan Jeffers would be great for anyone's Christmas wish list.