Born on this day – Robert Frost:

Robert Frost

Writer

March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963

Credits:

Books and plays:

30 Press Presents: Classic Horror Poems Volume One (2023); A Boy's Will (1913); A Masque Of Reason (1945); A Prayer in Spring (2011); Baseball: a Literary Anthology (2002); Birches (1916); Blueberries (2014); Christmas Trees (1990); Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays (1995); Come in and Other Poems (2000); Dark (2000); In the Clearing (1957); Mountain Interval (1916); New Hampshire (1923); North of Boston (1914); O Taste and See: Food Poems (2003); Selected Poems (1955); Selected Poems of Robert Frost (1955); Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1969); Swinger of Birches (1961); The Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading Their Own Poetry (1992); The Collected Poems of Robert Frost (1930); The Collected Prose (2008); The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 1 (2014); The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 2 (2016); The Poetry of Robert Frost (1930); The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart (1992); The Road Not Taken (1916); The Road Not Taken and Other Poems (1916); The Robert Frost Collection (2011); The Runaway (1998); Versed in Country Things (1996); Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews (1957); You Come Too (1916).

Poem titles:

A Blue Ribbon at Amesbury; A Brook in the City; A Cabin in the Clearing; A Concept Self-Conceived; A Considerable Speck; A Dream Pang; A Drumlin Woodchuck; A Girl's Garden; A Hundred Collars; A Late Walk; A Leaf Treader; A Line-storm Song; A Lone Striker; A Minor Bird; A Missive Missile; A Never Naught Song; A Passing Glimpse; A Patch of Old Snow; A Peck of Gold; A Prayer in Spring; A Record Stride; A Reflex; A Roadside Stand; A Servant to Servants; A Soldier; A Star In A Stone Boat; A Time to Talk; A Trial Run; A Winter Eden; A Wishing Well; Acceptance; Accidentally on Purpose; Acquainted with the Night; Acquainted with the Night; After Apple-Picking; After-Flakes; All Revelation; America is Hard to See; An Afterword; An Encounter; An Old Man's Winter Night; Asking for Roses; Assertive; At Woodward's Gardens; Atmosphere; Auspex; Away!; Bereft; Birches; Blueberries; Bond and Free; Brown's Descent, or the Willy-nilly Slide; Build Soil; But Outer Space; Canis Major; Choose Something Like a Star; Christmas Trees; Clear and Colder; Closed for Good; Come In; Cranberries at Noon; Departmental; Desert Places; Design; Devotion; Directive; Does No One at All Ever Feel This Way in the Least?; Dust in the Eyes; Dust of snow; Ends; Escapist – Never; Etherealizing; Evil Tendencies Cancel; Fire and Ice; Fireflies in the Garden; Flower-gathering; For John F. Kennedy His Inauguration; For Once, Then, Something; Forgive O, Lord; Four-Room Shack; Fragmentary Blue; From Iron; Gathering Leaves; Ghost; Going for Water; Good Hours; Hannibal; Happiness Makes Up In Height For What It Lacks In Length; Home Burial; How Hard Is It to Keep from Being King When It's in You and in the Situation; Hyla Brook; I Will Sing You One; Immigrants; In A Disused Graveyard; In a Glass of Cider; In a Vale; In Divés' Dive; In Equal Sacrifice; In Neglect; In the Home Stretch; In Time of Cloudburst; In Winter in the Woods; Into My Own; Iris by Night; It Takes All Sorts; Kitty Hawk; Leaves Compared with Flowers; Lines Written in Dejection on the Eve of a Great Success; Locked Out; Lodged; Lost in Heaven; Love and a Question; Meeting and Passing; Mending Wall; Misgiving; Moon Compasses; Mowing; My Butterfly; My November Guest; Neither Out Far nor in Deep; Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same; New Hampshire; Not All There; Not Quite Social; Nothing Gold Can Stay; Now Close the Windows; October; Of the Stones of the Place; On a Bird Winging in its Sleep; On a Tree Fallen Across the Road (To Hear Us Talk); On Being Chosen Poet of Vermont; On Going Unnoticed; On Looking Up by Chance at the Constellations; On Taking from the Top to Broaden the Base; On the Heart's Beginning to Cloud the Mind; Once by the Pacific; One Guess; One More Brevity; Our Doom to Bloom; Out, Out; Pan with Us; Paul's Wife; Pea Brush; Peril of Hope; Pertinax; Pod of the Milkweed; Precaution; Provide, Provide; Putting in the Seed; Quandary; Questioning Faces; Range-Finding; Reluctance; Revelation; Riders; Rose Pogonias; Sand Dunes; Sitting by a Bush in Broad Sunlight; Skeptic; Snow; Some Science Fiction; Spoils of the Dead; Spring Pools; Stars; Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening; Storm Fear; Taken Doubly; Taken Singly; Ten mills; The Aim Was Song; The Andes; The Armful; The Axe-Helve; The Bad Island – Easter; The Bear; The Bearer of Evil Tidings; The Birthplace; The Black Cottage; The Bonfire; The Cocoon; The Code; The Cow in Apple Time; The Death of the Hired Man; The Demiurge's Laugh; The Discovery of the Madeiras; The Door in the Dark; The Draft Horse; The Egg and the Machine; The Exposed Nest; The Fear; The Figure in the Doorway; The Flood; The Flower Boat; The Freedom of the Moon; The Generations of Men; The Gift Outright; The Gold Hesperidee; The Grind-Stone; The Gum-Gatherer; The Hardship of Accounting; The Hill Wife; The Himalayas; The Housekeeper; The Investment; The Last Mowing; The Last Word of a Blue Bird; The Lesson for Today; The Line-Gang; The Lovely Shall Be Choosers; The Malverns; The Master Speed; The Milky Way Is a Cowpath; The Moon; The Most of It; The Mountain; The Need of Being Versed in Country Things; The Objection to Being Stepped on; The Old Barn at the Bottom of the Fogs; The Onset; The Outlands; The Oven Bird; The Pasture; The Pauper Witch of Grafton; The Peaceful Shepherd; The Road Not Taken; The Rose Family; The Self-seeker; The Silken Tent; The Sound of Trees; The Span of Life; The Star Splitter; The Strong Are Saying Nothing; The Subverted Flower; The Telephone; The Thatch; The Times Table; The Trial by Existence; The Tuft of Flowers; The Vanishing Red; The Vantage Point; The Vindictives; The White-Tailed Hornet; The Witch of Coos; The Wood-pile; The Wrights' Biplane; There Are Roughly Zones; They Were Welcome to Their Belief; To A Moth Seen In Winter; To a Thinker; To Earthward; To the Thawing Wind; Tree at My Window; Two Look at Two; Two Tramps in Mud Time; Unharvested; Version; Voice Ways; Waiting Afield at Dusk; Waspish; We Vainly Wrestle; West-Running Brook; What Fifty Said; Why Wait for Science; Wind and Window Flower.

The Last Word of a Bluebird, poem by Robert Frost:

The Last Word of a Bluebird

Poem by Robert Frost.

As I went out a Crow
In a low voice said, “Oh,
I was looking for you.
How do you do?
I just came to tell you
To tell Lesley (will you?)
That her little Bluebird
Wanted me to bring word
That the north wind last night
That made the stars bright
And made ice on the trough
Almost made him cough
His tail feathers off.
He just had to fly!
But he sent her Good-by,
And said to be good,
And wear her red hood,
And look for skunk tracks
In the snow with an ax –
And do everything!
And perhaps in the spring
He would come back and sing.”

Recommended reading:

Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays

Video by Jack Kost
2025

Music credit:

Cold October – Soft Piano Music
By Clavier-Music
From Pixabay

The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost:

The Road Not Taken

By Robert Frost.
Published in 1916.
 

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.

 

Robert Frost
(1874 – 1963)

Recommended reading - Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays (1995):

Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays

By Robert Frost.

Edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson.

Published by Library of America.

Published 1995.

First Edition.

Hardcover.

ISBN-10: 188301106X

ISBN-13: 978-1883011062

Description:

Justly celebrated at home and abroad, Robert Frost is perhaps America’s greatest twentieth-century poet and a towering figure in American letters. From the publication of his first collections, A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), Frost was recognized as a poet of unique power and formal skill, and the enduring significance of his work has been acknowledged by each subsequent generation. His poetry ranges from deceptively simply pastoral lyrics and genial, vernacular genre pieces to darker meditations, complex and ironic.

Here, based on extensive research into his manuscripts and published work, is the first authoritative and truly comprehensive collection of his writings. Brought together for the first time in a Library of America single volume is all the major poetry, a generous selection of uncollected poems, all of Frost’s dramatic writing, and the most extensive gathering of his prose writings ever published, several of which are printed here for the first time.

The core of this collection is the 1949 Complete Poems of Robert Frost, the last collection supervised by Frost himself. This version of the poems is free of unauthorized editorial changes introduced into subsequent editions. Also included is In the Clearing (1962), Frost’s final volume of poetry. Verse drawn from letters, articles, pamphlets, and journals makes up the largest selection of uncollected poems ever assembled, including nearly two dozen beautiful early works printed for the first time. Also gathered here are all the dramatic works: three plays and two verse masques.

The unprecedented prose section includes more than three times as many items as any other collection available. It is rich and diverse, presenting many newly discovered or rediscovered pieces. Especially unusual items include Frost’s contribution to John F. Kennedy’s inauguration and two fascinating 1959 essays on “The Future of Man.” Several manuscript items are published here for the first time, including the essays “‘Caveat Poeta’” and “The Way There,” Frost’s remarks on being appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1958, the preface to a proposed new edition of North of Boston, and many others. A selection of letters represents all of Frost’s important comments about prosody, poetics, style, and his theory of “sentence sounds.”

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.