Whistling Past the Graveyard in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

  Robert Frost is a bad bad man. But the poems have suffered most for it. Leaving aside the many scholarly commentaries that long ago unmasked the subterfuge of “The Road Not Taken,” after David Orr’s book, The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Gets Wrong (2015 Penguin Press), and similar skirmishes in the popular media, including the Netflix series The Orange Is the New Black (Season 1, Episode 7), we can say that the assault on the poem has finally been successful and that it lies disemboweled at the famous fork where the roads that go through the yellow wood both end in some smoke-filled drawing room as old war stories are exchanged between snuff and snifters. Had Michel Foucault been alive to witness this denouement, he might have used the poem’s treatment as the prime example of capital punishment in lieu of the torture and execution of Robert-François Damiens.

  The mischief, of course, is that “The Road Not Taken” is based upon a verbal sleight of hand that appears to counsel us to choose the road “less traveled” in order to reap life’s greatest rewards. Part of the sleight is the figurative language of the poem, which demands that any discussion of it be equally figurative. We naturally assume that taking the road less traveled imports greater effort and risk than the well-worn roads traveled by everyone else. The greater the risk, the greater the reward, right? Even if that were true, the poem actually speaks to how we all apportion value, good or bad, to our choices in life based upon the consequences we apprehend at any given time. The poem’s difficulty comes from the deceptive way Frost communicates this idea. First, his narrator effectively says that the choice of road was a matter of chance, because both roads, if judged by the amount of wear, were “really about the same”:

Then took the other, 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.

Once committing himself he cannot undo his choice, as “way leads on to way/ I doubted if I should ever come back.” The narrator imagines himself “ages and ages hence” recounting the pivotal moment when he made his choice that day at the fork in the road, and notwithstanding his earlier characterization, he instead recalls that he took the road “less traveled” and declares that “that” (the road or his choice) “made all the difference,” though precisely how we are not told. Most readers assume there is a note of triumph in this final statement, and this is partly due to a desire to read the poem as an example of American exceptionalism. But it may be fairly taken as complaint rather than boast. Indeed, the emotional predicate of regret is found in such lines as “sorry I could not travel both” and “I shall be telling this with a sigh,” indicating that a general sense of defeat is perhaps a truer, more likely reading of the text. Even the title of the poem suggests that its actual subject is the road “not taken.”

  But as we have said, this is a sleight of hand made possible by Frost’s intentional misdirection. The “road less traveled” and the “difference” it makes are metaphors as notional terms whose attributes lie solely in the eyes of the beholder. In other words, depending on the individual and the circumstances, a road less traveled might seem like a well-worn road (and vice versa), and the “difference” might be for the better or for the worse. We can push this further and say that every one of us can claim to have taken the road less traveled because we each have our own lives to live, in which case there will always be some regrets here and there about the directions we went in. It is human nature to rationalize outcomes in terms of particular choices we made in the past, though there is as much truth to this kind of cause and effect reasoning as there is in the proverb, “For Want of a Nail.” Because of its sly and deceptive features, Frank Lentricchia described “The Road Not Taken” as “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

  If the corporeal odor of American exceptionalism has tainted the public’s appreciation of what Orr has described (based upon its Google search count) as the most popular poem in the language, the notion that the balance of Frost’s poetry is otherwise patently transparent is an even more egregious misconception. In 1953, Randall Jarrell reported:

[W]hen I taught at Salzburg I found that my European students did not find the “The Waste Land” half as hard as Frost’s poetry, since one went with, and the other went against, all their own cultural presuppositions; I had not simply to explain “Home Burial” to them, I had to persuade them that it was a poem.^[1]

  Perhaps the problem of Frost’s poetry started with the unwarranted expectations that arise from the subject matter itself (pastoral themes for the most part) or the unassuming diction that was the hallmark of his style. Also, Frost relishes playing the confidence man, the genial three-card Monte who secretly takes delight in turning the odd shaggy dog story (“The Mountain” and “The Code” are two examples) into a toxic parable of human fallibility. After all, who would suspect that the foremost poet of the American pastoral was bent on exploding our most cherished beliefs? Jarrell described the public’s misplaced perception in his essay, “The Other Frost”:

He seems to them [ordinary readers] a sensible, tender, humorous poet who knows all about trees and farms and folks in New England, and still has managed to get an individualistic, fairly optimistic, thoroughly American philosophy out of what he knows; there’s something reassuring about his poetry, they feel – almost like prose. Certainly there’s nothing hard or odd or gloomy about it.

These views of Frost, it seems to me, come either from not knowing his poems well enough or from knowing the wrong poems too well. . . . [Jarrell then names the following poems among Frost’s “best”: “The Witches of Coös,” “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep,” “Directive,” “A Servant to Servants,” “Provide, Provide,” “Home Burial,” “Acquainted with the Night,” “The Pauper Witch of Grafton,” “After Apple-Picking,” “Desert Places,” and “The Fear.”]

* * *

And so far from being obvious, optimistic, orthodox, many of these poems are extraordinarily subtle and strange, poems which express an attitude that, at its most extreme, makes pessimism seem a hopeful evasion; they begin with a flat and terrible reproduction of the evil in the world and end by saying: It’s so; and there’s nothing you can do about it; and if there were, would you ever do it? The limits which existence approaches and falls back from have seldom been stated with such bare composure.^[2]

  “The Road Not Taken,” while admittedly the most popular of Frost’s work, is not his most misunderstood poem. That honor belongs to “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which appears to be a Janus-faced coin: on one side is a charming poem about a man caught up in the wonder of an evening snowfall in the woods; on the other is a momento mori poem with, perhaps, a suicide subtext. How do we reconcile the two? It is true that Frost mixed the gentle winter scene with odd elements that belie the Currier and Ives Christmas card: the curious ease of the man who has driven his horse-drawn carriage to this isolated place, between “dark and deep” woods and a “frozen lake,” “without a farmhouse near” and on the “darkest evening of the year.” Anyone who has ever driven a car on a dark country road in New England during a mid-winter snowfall will tell you that getting to a safe place as soon as possible is foremost in one’s thoughts, and we would naturally expect the same of the driver of a horse-drawn carriage off-piste in the early twentieth century. Who is this man and why has he come here? The remote location is an unlikely waypoint for travelers with “promises to keep.” His discourse is not that of a daredevil out for a thrill, nor does it indicate that he is a simpleton or “troubled” soul; rather, he is as calm and self-possessed as if he were out for a ride in a local park on a sunny day in summer.

  The poem is also remarkable for its dreamlike frame and plain prosody. Without prologue, we suddenly overhear the narrator’s thoughts as a soliloquy. He doesn’t tell us who he is or what has brought him to this place or why at this time. As he describes the winter landscape, the figures of the frozen lake, the deep and dark woods, the encroaching darkness and significant snowfall (enough to “fill up” the woods) become forbidding characters in this playlet. The only other character, the narrator’s horse, serves as a foil which the narrator offers up for comic relief. On the other side of the equation are figurative references to the winter solstice and the Christmas season in “darkest evening of the year” and “harness bells.” Finally, as if late for a very important date, the narrator reminds himself of “promises to keep” and disappears into the snow. With his haunting refrain, “And miles to go before I sleep,” he might as well be a ghost or a stand-in for Santa Claus. In contrast to the complexity of the form and prosody in “The Wood-Pile” — which has a similar setting, but is composed in blank verse and uses metaphor, simile and symbolism to serve the discernible structure of a narrative that is obviously addressed to an audience — “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is a lyric meditation in medias res, tersely imaged and simply versed, seeming to exist for no other purpose than to privately diary the raw experience of being present in this scene. As such, the poem seems more thought-experiment than anything else.

  How much different the poem might have been if it were set in a familiar locale, close to home, during daylight hours or even under a full moon, where the narrator could relish the enchanting snowfall before proceeding back to his abode. Even if the only place he could sleep was miles away, we would not be moved to question the calm assurance of his voice. Given sufficient light and visibility and absent extraordinary misadventure, certainly he would reach his destination. But, as we have noted above, the circumstances are markedly different in the poem. Let’s start with the darkness and snow. In 1922, horse-drawn carriages could be equipped with oil lamps (as in“The Draft Horse”), but Frost omits any mention of artificial light in the scene, which notably differs from the lamplight featured in “The Fear.” Though “watch his woods fill up with snow” suggests that it may still be twilight, it is nonetheless the “darkest evening of the year,” with no moonlight or starlight to help see the scene, let alone guide the way out. Even with an oil lamp, snow and darkness make navigation extremely difficult and, as observed in “Snow,” it wasn’t unusual for people to get lost and freeze to death in winter weather.

  Aside from the hazards of darkness and snow, a traveler could fall prey to other untoward circumstances, as we see in “The Draft Horse”:

With a lantern that wouldn’t burn
In too frail a buggy we drove
Behind too heavy a horse
Through a pitch-dark limitless grove.

And a man came out of the trees
And took our horse by the head
And reaching back to his ribs
Deliberately stabbed him dead.

The ponderous beast went down
With a crack of a broken shaft.
And the night drew through the trees
In one long invidious draft.

The most unquestioning pair
That ever accepted fate
And the least disposed to ascribe
Any more than we had to hate,

We assumed that the man himself
Or someone he had to obey
Wanted us to get down
And walk the rest of the way.

Long ago, even as it is today, before venturing far from home one had to consider the length of the journey and seasonal factors like prevailing weather and road conditions, as well as provisional requirements for food and accommodations. In “The Draft Horse,” we see that the necessary equipage was also important, and here there is a broken lamp, a frail buggy and a ponderous horse, all unsuitable for the journey. On the road there was also the added danger of highwaymen and the kind of lunatic described in “The Draft Horse.” Yet, the narrator in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” seems blithely oblivious of the risks in his situation.

  The critics have attempted to reconcile the poem’s conflicted elements by ascribing to Frost’s narrator perceptions and dispositions that are not actually stated in the text, a form of intuitive interpolation that attempts to add the rebar of realism to the dream. Some have followed John Ciardi’s infamous analysis^[3] and interpreted the poem as a “suicide poem,” despite the fact that Frost bluntly denied this to be the case. Following Ciardi, Jeffrey Meyers says: “The theme of ‘Stopping by Woods’ is the temptation of death, even suicide, symbolized by the woods that are filling up with snow on the darkest evening of the year.”^[4] Richard Poirier’s view appears to agree, as it focuses on the misguided character of the narrator succumbing to the seduction of the woods:

He is, after all, a man of business who has promised his time, his future to other people. It would appear that he is not only a scheduled man but a fairly convivial one. He knows who owns which parcels of land, or thinks he does, and his language has a sort of pleasant neighborliness, as in the phrase “stopping by.” It is no wonder that his little horse would think his actions “queer” or that he would let the horse, instead of himself, take responsibility for the judgment. He is in danger of losing himself; and his language by the end of the third stanza begins to carry hints of a seductive luxuriousness unlike anything preceding it . . . . With the drowsy repetitiousness of rhymes in the last stanza, four in a row, it takes some optimism to be sure that (thanks mostly to his little horse, who makes the only assertive sound in the poem) he will be able to keep his promises. At issue, of course, is really whether or not he will be able to “keep” his life.^[5]

While Poirier takes obvious liberties with the text, weaving out of whole cloth specific aspects of the narrator’s character and affairs, a life-threatening danger is clearly lurking in the periphery.

  Richard Gray finds a momento mori poem where, in the end, the narrator has roused himself from the “dangerous seductiveness of the woods”:

This could, after all, be a metaphorical reference to the brief span of human life and the compulsion this puts the narrator under to take risks and explore the truth while he can. Only a few ‘miles’ to go before ‘I sleep’ in death: such a chilling memento mori perhaps justifies stopping by the woods in the first place and considering the spiritual quest implicit in the vision they offer. Perhaps: the point is that neither narrator nor reader can be sure. ‘The poem is the act of having the thought’, Frost insisted; it is process rather than product, it invites us to share in the experiences of seeing, feeling, and thinking, not simply to look at their results.^[6]

Gray’s quotation of Frost is apt, as the psychic experience of the poem is its most telling feature: the narrator finds himself in a situation that might under other circumstances seem eminently pleasurable, but here a palpable danger exists and is held at bay simply by strength of will.

  Reuben A. Brower sees mystery in the poem’s figurative elements and hears the “lullaby of inner speech” being sung, although he feels the poem is too allusive to reveal its purposes:

The dark nowhere of the woods, the seen and heard movement of things, and the lullaby of inner speech are an invitation to sleep—and winter sleep is again close to easeful death. (‘Dark’ and ‘deep’ are typical Romantic adjectives.) All of these poetic suggestions are in the purest sense symbolic: we cannot say in other terms what they are ‘of,’ though we feel their power. There are critics who have gone much further in defining what Frost ‘meant’; but perhaps sleep is mystery enough. Frost’s poem is symbolic in the manner of Keats’s ‘To Autumn,’ where the over-meaning is equally vivid and equally unnameable.^[7]

  Mark Richardson provides a useful meta-critical commentary on the poem, particularly noting a conversation between Frost and Louis Mertins on the subject of John Ciardi’s commentary:

I suppose people think I lie awake nights worrying about what people like [John] Ciardi of the Saturday Review write and publish about me [in 19S8]…Now Ciardi is a nice fellow—one of those bold, brassy fellows who go ahead and say all sorts of things. He makes my “Stopping By Woods” out a death poem. Well, it would be like this if it were. I’d say, “This is all very lovely, but I must be getting on to heaven.” There’d be no absurdity in that. That’s all right, but it’s hardly a death poem. Just as if I should say here tonight, “This is all very well, but I must be getting on to Phoenix, Arizona, to lecture there.” [Mertins 371]^[8]

  If not a “death poem” (i.e., about suicide), what is it? Not just a poem about watching a snowfall, since we still must account for the forbidding aspects identified by the critics. As the past is always the lens through which we first view the present, it is often helpful to examine a poem in light of the prior work of other poets. Meyers draws our attention to poems by Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Lovell Beddoes and John Keats as influences that Frost could have relied on:

The most amazing thing about this work is that three of the fifteen lines (the last line repeats the previous one) are transformations from other poems. “He gives his harness bells a shake” comes from Scott’s “The Rover” (in Palgrave): “He gave the bridle-reins a shake.: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep” comes from Thomas Lovell Beddoes’ “The Phantom Wooer“: “Our bed is lovely, dark, and sweet.” The concluding “And miles to go before I sleep” comes from Keats’ “Keen Fitful Gusts“: “And I have many miles on foot to fare.” Though these three lines are variations from other poets, Frost, writing in the tradition of English verse, makes them original and new, and integrates them perfectly into his own poem.^[9]

Each of these sources — taken on faith that Frost was familiar with and either consciously or unconsciously used them — make provocative perspectives for “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The “charger” of the doughty rover in Sir Walter Scott’s poem has now become a “little horse,” whose diminutive size and animal nature make it the narrator’s plaything and easily mocked when it “thinks” (by way of psychological projection) that “some mistake” has been made. The phantom wooer in Beddoes’s poem is an incubus who attempts to seduce his dreaming lover into their “bed” in the grave, which is transposed by Frost to the “woods,” thereby evoking both their danger and seductive aspects. Best of all, Keats’s “Keen, fitful gusts are whisp’ring here and there” takes place on a landscape and evening that is very close to those in Frost’s poem, and only the thoughts of the “friendliness” of the final destination (the “little cottage” where the poet communes with the spirits of Milton and Petrarch) can hold at bay the inhospitable elements of the journey: the “fitful gusts,” the “bushes leafless and dry,” the “cold stars” and “bleak air.” Indeed, Keats’s sonnet exhibits a familiar avoidance strategy that lies at the heart of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

  The prosody of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” also bears a strong resemblance to a famous German poem, “Wandrers Nachtlied II” (“Wanderer’s Night Song II) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832):

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

Translated:

Over all the peaks
Is peace,
In all the treetops
You feel
Hardly a breeze;
The little birds are silent in the woods.
Only wait, soon
You too shall be at peace.

The reader senses a softness in the rhythm and particularly in the sound of the words: “Über,” “Ruh,” “Spürest du,” “Hauch,” and “Ruhest du auch.” The same thing is suggested by Frost’s repeated use of the sibilant “s’s” and breathing “o’s” and “e’s” as well as the rhymes: “know,” “though,” and “snow” – “lake” “shake” and “flake” – “queer,” “near” and “year” – “deep” “keep” and “sleep” – all of which contain embedded “h” sounds (voiceless glottal fricatives). The conclusion of Goethe’s poem (“Only wait, soon/ You too shall be at peace”) heralds our abiding unity with nature in the harmonious arrival of restful sleep and, simultaneously, serves the purpose of momento mori. While Frost’s poem, with its final turn toward a dutiful re-engagement with the world, is more about the way we resist death, both poems combine a dreamlike setting with a lullaby’s prosody in order to allay our mortal fears. In essence, both Goethe and Frost are whistling past the graveyard.

  Assuming that the “darkest evening of the year” is not a projection of some inner darkness — nothing in the poem indicates that a personality defect of any sort exists — and instead, that it accurately reflects the scene and time, it is one that the narrator seems too comfortable with. Frost’s narrators can be notoriously untrustworthy, as is the case in “The Draft Horse,” where, ironically, the narrator “assumed” the horse’s assassin had the best of intentions and merely “wanted us to get down/ And walk the rest of the way.” His narrators often represent a presumption of teleological design; that there must be a (good) reason for things happening the way they do. This is how human beings have primarily dealt with the psychic stress of those confrontations when reality punctures one’s sense of power to control the brutality, chaos and indeterminacy of life. In Frost’s time, before the preeminence of modern science, religious belief and superstition traditionally supplied the necessary structure for explaining the inexplicable, in default of which was speculative rationalization, folklore and “common knowledge.” This reductive scheme is what Frost’s narrators resort to in poems such as “The Road Not Taken,” “After Apple Picking,” “The Wood-Pile,” “Snow,” and “The Witch of Coos.” Thus, in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the observation, “My little horse must think it queer,” soft-pedals the danger, implying that a brute beast knows little outside his familiar routine. But the “little horse” here is a canary in a coal mine by any other estimation, and “must think it queer,” though intended humorously, amounts to a sublimated projection of unease that ironically finds release in the alarm sound of the harness bells (which are notably used in a manner adverse to their usual Christmas associations).

  Frost’s greatest gift was his ear for common speech, which he could render into highly structured poetic verse, and certainly, the most notable aspect of the poem is the narrator’s composed tone, which flows from the poem’s form and rhyme scheme: four quatrains in iambic tetrameter which have rhymes interwoven by way of a Frostian modification of Dante’s terza rima (Dante: aba bcb cdc etc. and Frost: aaba bbcb ccdc dddd). But the steady rhythm and homogeneity of the rhyme scheme seem too quaintly persistent, as if the poet’s intention was to cultivate the familiarity and friendliness of the setting where the conditions more likely bespeak dread.

  The gloss on the narrator’s tone is also betrayed by select elements of his language. The first stanza has several complications, beginning with “Whose woods these are I think I know,” by which the narrator implies a familiarity with the owner and the woods that is coextensive with each other, a relationship wholly dependent upon whether he knows the owner at all. When he follows with “His home is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here,” the pretense of familiarity is compromised by the implication that he is there without the owner’s knowledge. As neither the village nor a neighboring farmhouse is within sight, it might be that the narrator is actually lost and trying to gather his bearings; but if so, he is not one to be admittedly troubled by it. Instead, his attitude carries a sense of worldliness: the darkest evening, the woods, the frozen lake, the snowfall and travel far from home are all of a piece to him. This point of view notably governs his emotional responses. If danger lurks in “dark and deep” woods, it is primarily modified by the adjective, “lovely,” because anything that is worthy of love must be ultimately benevolent; if it is snowing on the “darkest evening of the year,” one will still be able to see well enough because there is only the fairy tale “sweep/ of easy wind and downy flake,” which utterly defangs the weather; and if one has “promises to keep,” he will always reach his destination, because all such promises must be fulfilled before one is allowed to “sleep.” He can lightly shrug-off the fretfulness of his horse by using the diminutive “little,” and thereby minimize the suggestion that “some mistake” has been made. His worldliness makes its final gesture of self-importance toward a heightened sense of personal responsibility in “promises to keep” (“promises” being the only trisyllabic word in the poem), which is the functional equivalent of Keats’s desire to reach his “little cottage,” because it invests the journey with deserving purpose and simultaneously diminishes the adversity of the environment. Though we may be wary of trusting a character this cool and implacable, given the circumstances he might be the only one we can trust to get out of there unharmed.

  “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is, on one level at least, another Frostian illustration of a kind of psychological avoidance we engage in to escape fear — particularly the fear of death — in order to be reassured of a presiding natural order that reinforces a preeminent sense of self-determination. Our reluctance to confront the truth is a familiar theme, as we see in “Neither Far Out Nor In Deep“:

The land may vary more;
But whatever the truth may be —
The water comes ashore,
And the people look out to sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep.

  If “The Road Not Taken” and “The Draft Horse” exemplify our inexorable habit of creating alternative histories to address our need for a rational order, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” similarly embraces a scheme of avoidance that exalts the human being over mortality and the natural world. Wallace Stevens mined the same vein in “A Rabbit as the King of Ghosts,” where we, in the figure of the rabbit, “hump” ourselves up to confront the threat of death in the person of the fat, red-tongued cat lurking in the yard, to the point that “You sit with your head like a carving in space/ And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.”

  “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is perhaps Frost’s most unique poem, in that it serves as an allegory of a universal state of being. Figuratively speaking, we are always between the woods and the frozen lake, watching the snowfall on the darkest evening of the year, careless of the circumstances, feeling we have all the time in the world left to fulfill our promises. Whether it is God or a man who owns the woods, he lives in a place far away where he can’t see us, and there is no one else around to help us if we need it. We deal with this existential crisis in many ways, none of which is mutually exclusive; whether we suspend the psychic tension and its consequent hallucinatory experiences by a psychological flight into a waking “sleep,” as in “After Apple Picking,” or by a physical flight whose inevitable frustration ends in virtual or actual suicide, as in “The Hill Wife.” Frost’s preferred method, however, was (in Freudian terms) sublimation, particularly in labor that serves community, which the narrator extols in “Two Tramps in Mud Time.” In “Mowing” we are told: “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” For Frost, labor is the nexus between our illusions and the natural world. In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the labor implied by “promises to keep” is the saving grace that provides escape from the peril of a waking sleep and the dream that, if overindulged, would be the narrator’s ruin. The echoing repetition of the final lines (“And miles to go before I sleep”), with its limitless vistas of time and distance, denotes a strength of will, wrought in labor, that appears resistant to any obstacle. Though there is sufficient reason to question whether the narrator safely reaches his destination, wherever that is, everyone who reads the poem presumes he does.

  Of course, Frost wrote about the illusion of order and normality for the purpose of exploiting its poetic value:

I began life wanting perfection and determined to have it. I got so I ceased to expect it and could do without it. Now I find I actually crave the flaws of human handiwork. I gloat over imperfection. Look out for me. You as critic and psychoanalyst will know how to do that. Nevertheless I’m telling you something in a self conscious moment that may throw light on every page of my writing for what it is worth. I mean I am a bad bad man. But yours — R.F.^[10]

Perhaps Frost’s narrator in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is as self-deceptive as the narrator in “The Draft Horse,” yet he seems less so and even admirable for finding purpose in life, for being able to relinquish the dream for reality, as if to say: “This is all very well, but I must be getting on to Phoenix, Arizona, to lecture there.”

[1] Randall Jarrell, “The Obscurity of the Poet,” Poetry & the Age (Echo Press 1953), p. 9.

[2] Ibid, “The Other Frost,” p. 29-30.

[3] John Ciardi, The Saturday Review, May 12, 1958, p. 13 et al.

[4] Jeffrey Meyers, Robert Frost: A Biography (Houghton Mifflin 1996), p. 180.

[5] Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (Oxford University Press 1977) 182-183.

[6] Richard Gray, American Poetry of the Twentieth Century (Longman 1990), p. 133.

[7] Reuben A. Brower, The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention (Oxford Univ. Press 1963), p. 35.

[8] Mark Richardson, The Ordeal of Robert Frost: The Poet and His Poetics (Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 1997)

[9] Op Cit. at 180.

[10] Letter from Frost to Bernard DeVoto, October 20, 1938.

©  2017 Steven M. Critelli  All rights reserved.