robert frost essay on poetry

Martyn Crucefix

Blogging on poetry, teaching and translation – over 36,000 views in 2023 – 'one of the top 10 poetry blogs' (rogue strands), the meaning of robert frost’s ‘the figure a poem makes’.

Written in 1939, Robert Frost’s essay is combative, ironic, cryptic, delightful, damning of scholars and, for aspiring poets, encouraging of both a formal awareness and a cavalier attitude. The Figure a Poem Makes talks of the experience of writing rather than reading and the resulting poem is first described negatively (what it is not) then more positively in the famous phrases that it is a “momentary stay against confusion”, that it begins “in delight and ends in wisdom”. Along the way, Frost images the poet as giant, lover and grasshopper. Like most of his comments on poetry, the essay does not develop in a scholarly way, but there is an underlying coherence and in what follows I hope to track it down. You can read Frost’s full text here . I have also posted a discussion of Frost’s poem ‘A Soldier’ and of the poem ‘Two Look at Two’.

Paragraphs 1-3

Frost opens in the middle of a battle against what he calls “abstraction”, long accepted as part of philosophic method but now – in the first half of the 20 th century – “a new toy” in the hands of poets. This idea occupies the opening 3 paragraphs of the essay. It is the temptation to separate out the constituent elements of a poem and to elevate or prioritise one over all others. Frost’s faux-infantile tone here suggests he will not be offering any approval of this method (“Why can’t we have any one quality of poetry we choose by itself? . . . Our lives for it.”). He floats the idea of focusing only on the sound a poem makes – “sound is the gold in the ore”. He’s thinking of the experiments in sound of a Mallarme, a Tennyson, or a Swinburne, the lush aestheticism of a few years before. It may also be relevant that, in the UK, Dylan Thomas’ early work had appeared in the mid-1930s.

But Frost’s doubts about such approaches to poetic composition take a surprising form. From the premise that “the object in writing poetry is to make all poems sound as different as possible from each other” he argues that a reliance solely on linguistic and formal elements (“that of vowels, consonants, punctuation, syntax, words, sentences, metre”) is never going to be enough to achieve this aim. If we abstract for use only the sonic and formal elements of poetry, “[a]ll that can be done with words is soon told”. Frost is known for his interest in form (as against other Modernists’ scepticism about it) so it’s with some surprise that we hear him say: “So also with metres – particularly in our language where there are virtually but two, strict iambic and loose iambic. The ancients with many [more varieties of metre] were still poor if they depended on metres for all tune. It is painful to watch our sprung-rhythmists straining at the point of omitting one short from a foot for relief from monotony”.

With this Frostian chuckle, it’s clear that only monotony results from this approach and also that the poet can only gain relief from it with “the help of context-meaning-subject matter”. This clumsy, composite term is quickly honed down to the single word “meaning” (later in this essay he uses “theme” and “subject” to refer to the same thing). This is Frost’s argument against the lure of abstraction. The poet – even merely to achieve poems which sound as different as possible from each other – must have something to say, must mean something. The limits of pure sound/form can be breached once meaning is played across the sonic/formal qualities of language. For me this gives rise to images of a jazz soloist improvising across the rhythms of a band. For Frost: “The possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited metre are endless. And we are back in poetry as merely one more art of having something to say”.

The third paragraph opens: “Then there is this wildness whereof it is spoken”. The quasi-Biblical turn of phrase here suggests irony is again at work and it is a second form of abstraction that Frost is mocking. The “wildness” of a poem is the way its component parts are related – or not – to each other. He mocks the kind of “Poem” – note the ironic upper-case – that results from those who seek “to be wild with nothing to be wild about”. Though the sudden switches of focus, the jump-cuts of strong emotion, the leaps and gulfs of epiphanic moments are certainly (Frost implies) part of great poetry, the Modern(ist) abstractionist will want the leaps and jumps “pure”. Frost is again concerned about the lack of “context-meaning-subject matter” in this kind of poetry. He is taking aim at Surrealism with its reliance on irrational leaps, its dislocation of the senses, the shock value of the illogical. For Frost such practices lead only “to undirected associations and kicking ourselves from one chance suggestion to another in all directions as of a hot afternoon in the life of a grasshopper”. To create poetry that has something to say, Frost suggests for the second time that “Theme alone can steady us down [. . .] a subject that shall be fulfilled”.

Paragraphs 4–6

The essay now moves away from the constituents of a poem to the process of its writing, a process Frost sees as organic, instinctive, unpredictable, exploratory, holistic, and – like love – an experience and source of pleasure. This is where he uses the title phrase and the figure of a poem turns out to be ‘the course run’ by the poem, its track or trail or locus. The elliptical sequencing of the next few paragraphs doesn’t help the reader but Frost considers 5 areas: the poem’s origins, its development, its impact on writer and reader, the importance of the poet’s freedom.

The delight with which a poem begins is “the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew”. I don’t think this need be a literal recalling (on this Frost is not Wordsworth) but an insight or sensing of a connection between things which has a familiarity and feels like a remembrance. (The way in which metaphor is at the root of poetry and, perhaps, all knowledge is a point Frost developed in ‘Education by Poetry’ (1931)). The substance of this initial insight is what constitutes at least the beginnings of the “context-meaning-subject matter” so essential to any successful poem. All poets will recognise such a moment as Frost describes: “I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows.” But from such momentary delight and recognition (which will be accompanied by powerful emotions, even tears), Frost makes it clear the process, the figure , of the poem’s making, still lies ahead and is one of surprise and discovery.

As the poem struggles to exist, the poet must remain alert and watchful to what may help build it as “it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events”. It is a fundamentally metaphorical process of making connections, often quite unforeseen ones: “The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware of and so made no note of at the time”. In a striking image, Frost suggests we are like giants, drawing on elements of previous experience and hurling them ahead of us as a way of paving a pathway into our own future. We make sense of what we encounter by reference to what we have experienced in the past. It’s in this way that a poem is able to result in “a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as [religious] sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.” Our pathway ahead is illuminated, even if only briefly, by the ordering and landscaping the poem creates towards future experience by reference to what we already know.

This is why Frost teasingly argues the logic of a good poem is “backward, in retrospect”. What it must not be (and he has his earlier abstractionist targets in mind again) is pre-conceived or imposed before the fact (even if what we pre-impose is the illogical kicking ourselves from one chance suggestion to another). Such willed pre-conception can never yield anything other than a “trick poem”. It is not a prophecy, but rather something “felt”, a feeling figure, an emotional response involving both past and future and it must be “a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader.” The crucial role of emotion is perhaps easily missed. And to allow the role of the passions, Frost insists on the greatest freedom of the poetic materials to move about, to be moved about, to establish relations regardless of time and space, previous relation, and everything but affective affinity. This is Frost’s answer to one of the writer’s constant quandaries: how true to the original experience must I be? For Frost, truth to the emotional response at the inception of the poem (not necessarily the original incident’s emotional charge) is key and that demands artistic independence and freedom. Some distance is required.

Paragraph 7

The essay comes to concentrate finally on the necessary freedoms of the poet. The artist’s freedom is the freedom to raid his own experiences: “All I would keep for myself is the freedom of my material – the condition of body and mind now and then to summons aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived through.” It’s in this freedom that Frost contrasts scholars/academics and artists. Scholars work from knowledge. But so do artists – this is the point of the early paragraphs of the essay. But the two groups come by their knowledge in quite different ways. Scholars get theirs via a conscientious and thorough-going linearity of purpose. Poets, on the other hand, acquire theirs cavalierly and just as it happens, whether in or out of books. Poets ought to “stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields”. Poets do not learn by assignment, Frost says, not even by self-assignment.

In the course of the figure a new poem may be making, the poet must assert his liberty to work in a dramatically metaphorical way, to be possessed of both “originality” and “initiative” in order to be able to snatch “a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic”.

Frost concludes with another vivid image of the poem making its figure in the course of composition. “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.” The aptness of the image lies partly in the ice’s gradual vanishing (what a poem can offer is only ever “momentary”) and the frictionless quality reflects Frost’s insistence that a poem cannot be “worried into being” through pre-conceived effortfulness. The ice’s movement is generated and facilitated by its own process of melting and the poem too must propel itself (not be propelled by the artist). The resulting figure follows an unpredictable and fresh course, the links it draws from both past and present towards the future offering temporary clarifications of all three for the poet and (something Frost does not explore here) perhaps finally broadcast, available and effective for its readers too.

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8 thoughts on “ the meaning of robert frost’s ‘the figure a poem makes’ ”.

Dear Martyn,

A wonderful untangling of Frost’s sometimes gnomic instruction, thank you.

Robert Pinsky teaches his class to take a word for a title, then to brainstorm words that come to mind and group them by sound and looking it over, try to connect the words in odd ways. The goal is to get in touch with the elusive unconscious, so a little like play. Surprise and delight.

I’ve interpreted that piece of ice on a hot stove riding on its own melting to indicate that the form of a poem enacts its own dynamic, its own content. Many modern poems express wildness by wildness of structure, a little like modern architecture: sometimes too wild, too willed.

Thanks Bert – yes, gnomic is about right. The cryptic wisdom of the New England farmer – or the type Frost liked to play at.

Thanks very much for this excellent piece.

[…] recently posted a discussion about Robert Frost’s brief essay ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’. In this post I’m looking at one of the poems I’ll be teaching next year from the Cambridge […]

[…] have recently posted about Robert Frost’s brief essay ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’ as well as on one of his lesser known poems, ‘A Soldier’. The latter is one of the poems I’ll […]

[…] Auden refers us to Virgil’s Eclogues, and poets like Campion, Herrick and Mallarme (I’d add other assorted Surrealists, Dylan Thomas, John Ashbery). In being turned away from historical reality, there is inevitably a […]

[…] earlier post in which I talked my way through Frost’s essay ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’  has proved to be one of my most visited pieces. As both teacher and poet, I wanted to explore […]

[…] “When I looked at this poem again today, I remembered and revisited a brilliant summary of Robert Frost’s essay The Figure a Poem Makes, by Martyn Crucefix available to read on Martyn’s website, here. […]

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Robert Frost

Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, where his father, William Prescott Frost, Jr., and his mother, Isabelle Moodie, had moved from Pennsylvania shortly after marrying. After the death of his father from tuberculosis when Frost was eleven years old, he moved with his mother and sister, Jeanie, who was two years younger, to Lawrence, Massachusetts. He became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, enrolled at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire in 1892 and, later, at Harvard University, though he never earned a formal degree.

Frost drifted through a string of occupations after leaving school, working as a teacher, cobbler, and editor of the Lawrence Sentinel . His first published poem, “My Butterfly,” appeared on November 8, 1894 in the New York newspaper The Independent .

In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, with whom he’d shared valedictorian honors in high school, and who was a major inspiration for his poetry until her death in 1938. The couple moved to England in 1912, after they tried and failed at farming in New Hampshire. It was abroad where Frost met and was influenced by such contemporary British poets as Edward Thomas , Rupert Brooke , and Robert Graves . While in England, Frost also established a friendship with the poet Ezra Pound , who helped to promote and publish his work.

By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length collections, A Boy’s Will (Henry Holt and Company, 1913) and North of Boston (Henry Holt and Company, 1914), thereby establishing his reputation. By the 1920s, he was the most celebrated poet in America, and with each new book—including New Hampshire (Henry Holt and Company, 1923), A Further Range (Henry Holt and Company, 1936), Steeple Bush (Henry Holt and Company, 1947), and In the Clearing (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1962)—his fame and honors, including four Pulitzer Prizes, increased. Frost served as a consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress from 1958–59. In 1962, he was presented the Congressional Gold Medal. 

Though Frost’s work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England—and, though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his time—Frost is anything but merely a regional poet. The author of searching, and often dark, meditations on universal themes, he is a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony.

In a 1970 review of The Poetry of Robert Frost , the poet Daniel Hoffman describes Frost’s early work as “the Puritan ethic turned astonishingly lyrical and enabled to say out loud the sources of its own delight in the world,” and comments on Frost’s career as the “American Bard”: “He became a national celebrity, our nearly official poet laureate, and a great performer in the tradition of that earlier master of the literary vernacular, Mark Twain.”

President John F. Kennedy, at whose inauguration Frost delivered a poem, said of the poet, “He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding.” And famously, “He saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died in Boston on January 29, 1963.

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Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry.

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Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening Summary & Analysis by Robert Frost

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"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" was written by American poet Robert Frost in 1922 and published in 1923, as part of his collection New Hampshire . The poem is told from the perspective of a traveler who stops to watch the snow fall in the forest, and in doing so reflects on both nature and society. Frost claimed to have written the poem in one sitting. Though this is likely apocryphal, it would have been particularly impressive due to the poem's formal skill: it is written in perfect iambic tetrameter and utilizes a tight-knit chain rhyme characteristic to a form called the Rubaiyat stanza.

• Read the full text of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

The Full Text of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

1 Whose woods these are I think I know.   

2 His house is in the village though;   

3 He will not see me stopping here   

4 To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

5 My little horse must think it queer   

6 To stop without a farmhouse near   

7 Between the woods and frozen lake   

8 The darkest evening of the year.   

9 He gives his harness bells a shake   

10 To ask if there is some mistake.   

11 The only other sound’s the sweep   

12 Of easy wind and downy flake.   

13 The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

14 But I have promises to keep,   

15 And miles to go before I sleep,   

16 And miles to go before I sleep.

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” Summary

“stopping by woods on a snowy evening” themes.

Nature vs. Society

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Social Obligation vs. Personal Desire

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Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “stopping by woods on a snowy evening”.

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;    He will not see me stopping here    To watch his woods fill up with snow. 

My little horse must think it queer    To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake    The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake    To ask if there is some mistake.

Lines 11-12

The only other sound’s the sweep    Of easy wind and downy flake.   

Lines 13-16

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,    But I have promises to keep,    And miles to go before I sleep,    And miles to go before I sleep.

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” Symbols

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“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

Alliteration.

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Anthropomorphism

End-stopped line, “stopping by woods on a snowy evening” vocabulary.

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Darkest evening
• Downy flake
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Rhyme scheme, “stopping by woods on a snowy evening” speaker, “stopping by woods on a snowy evening” setting, literary and historical context of “stopping by woods on a snowy evening”, more “stopping by woods on a snowy evening” resources, external resources.

Academy of American Poets Essay on Robert Frost — Read an essay on "Sincerity and Invention" in Frost's work, which includes a discussion of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" read by Robert Frost — Watch Frost read the poem aloud.

Other Poets and Critics on "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" — Read excerpts from other analyses of the poem.

Biography of Robert Frost — Read the Poetry Foundation's biography of Robert Frost and analysis of his life's work.

Encyclopedia Entry on Robert Frost — Read the Encyclopedia Brittanica entry on Frost's life and work.

LitCharts on Other Poems by Robert Frost

Acquainted with the Night

After Apple-Picking

A Roadside Stand

Desert Places

Dust of Snow

Fire and Ice

Home Burial

Mending Wall

My November Guest

Nothing Gold Can Stay

The Death of the Hired Man

The Oven Bird

The Road Not Taken

The Sound of the Trees

The Tuft of Flowers

The Wood-Pile

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Robert Frost

Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in the United States. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech, Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New England in the early 20th century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes.

Frequently honored during his lifetime, Frost is the only poet to receive four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He became one of America’s rare “public literary figures, almost an artistic institution”. He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 for his poetic works. On July 22, 1961, Frost was named poet laureate of Vermont.

#AmericanWriters #PulitzerPrize

10 of the Best Robert Frost Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Any list of the top ten best poems by such a major poet as Robert Frost (1874-1963) is bound to inspire disagreement or, at least, discussion; but we thought we’d throw our literary cap in the ring and offer our own selection of Robert Frost’s greatest poems, along with a little bit about each poem. Do you agree with our recommendations? What should/shouldn’t be on this list, in your view?

Learn more about Frost’s writing with our pick of the most famous quotations from his work .

1. ‘ Mending Wall ’.

One of Frost’s most famous poems, ‘Mending Wall’ is about the human race’s primitive urge to ‘mark its territory’ and our fondness for setting clear boundaries for our houses and gardens. Whilst Frost believes that such markers are a throwback to an earlier stage in mankind’s development, his neighbour believes that (as we have discussed here) ‘ Good fences make good neighbours .’

The poem is frequently misinterpreted, as Frost himself observed in 1962, shortly before his death. ‘People are frequently misunderstanding it or misinterpreting it.’ But he went on to remark, ‘The secret of what it means I keep.’ We can analyse ‘Mending Wall’ as a poem contrasting two approaches to life and human relationships: the approach embodied by Frost himself in the poem (or by the speaker of his poem, at least), and the approach represented by his neighbour. It is Frost’s neighbour, rather than Frost himself (or Frost’s speaker), who insists: ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’

2. ‘ Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening ’.

One of Frost’s best-loved poems if not the best-loved, ‘Stopping by Woods’ was inspired by a real event in Frost’s life: stopping by the woods on his way home, the poet despaired that he was poor and didn’t have enough money to provide for his family, but rather than give up he decided to soldier on and ‘choose life’ rather than the tempting escape offered by the woods. Everything else is silent around them, apart from the soft wind and the slight sound of snowfall.

Frost concludes by telling us that, lovely, dark, and inviting as the woods are, he has prior commitments that he must honour, so he must leave this place of peace and tranquillity and continue on his journey before he can sleep for the night. Observe the highly unusual and controlled rhyme scheme that Frost uses: he doesn’t just employ a rhyme scheme, but instead he links each stanza to the next through repeating the same rhymes at different points in the succeeding stanza.

There’s also Frost’s use of regular iambic tetrameter throughout the poem, and his choice to end-stop each line: there’s no enjambment, there are no run-on lines, and this lends the poem an air of being a series of simple, pithy statements or observations, rather than a more profound meditation. There’s something inevitable about it: it’s less a Wordsworthian ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ than a more modern acknowledgment that most of us, as W. H. Davies put it in another poem from around this time, ‘have no time to stand and stare’ at nature.

3. ‘ Birches ’.

‘One could do worse than be a swinger of birches’: so concludes this wonderful blank-verse meditation on the fun of playing around with these fine trees, swinging from them – even dying by falling from them. That’s the way to go! Unfortunately, the birches Frost sees in this poem turn out to have been bent, not by a boy swinging from them, but from an ice-storm – but Frost prefers the more romanticised notion of play his imagination dreams up.

‘Birches’ draws on Robert Frost’s childhood memories of swinging on birch trees as a boy. In summary, the poem is a meditation on these trees, which are supple (i.e. easily bent) but strong (not easily broken). Contrasting the birches with ‘straighter darker trees’ which surround them, Frost says he likes to think they are bent because a boy has been swinging on them.

When Frost says that he would like to ‘come back to [nature] and begin over’, there’s a sense of wistfulness that extends far greater than birch-swinging, hinting at the adult’s vain yearning to return to childhood and live his life over again.

We have analysed this poem here .

4. ‘ Tree at my Window ’.

Another tree poem, this. Many of Robert Frost’s greatest poems feature trees and woods, and many of his poems take as their starting-point a simple observation of nature that then prompts a deeper meditation. (We might compare his friend Edward Thomas here.)

Frost begins by addressing the tree in tautological terms which almost recall a child’s song: ‘Tree at my window, window tree’. The last two lines add nothing to the meaning of the first four, but they set the blithe, relaxed tone that dominates the whole poem. The poet tells this ‘window tree’ that he lowers his sash window when night comes, closing it, but he doesn’t like to draw the curtain across the window to block out the tree.

The final stanza earns this short poem its place on this list: it sees Frost identifying his ‘window tree’ as a kindred spirit, with the tree concerned with ‘outer’ and Frost with ‘inner, weather’.

5. ‘ Acquainted with the Night ’.

This one is slightly unusual in Robert Frost’s oeuvre in focusing on the urban rather than rural world of many of his other famous poems. But one of the problems in interpreting the meaning of this poem is that Frost’s speaker refuses to tell us how he feels about his solitary wandering through the night: he is, to borrow a phrase from the poem, ‘unwilling to explain’.

This sonnet-like poem (for more on this, click on our analysis below) begins and ends with the same line, which also provides the poem with its title: ‘I have been one acquainted with the night’. This is another poem about walking and despairing: the poet wanders the city at night, and finds little to comfort him among the dark streets. A fine poem about urban isolation, and one of Frost’s best (and most accessible) poems.

6. ‘ Fire and Ice ’.

This nine-line poem was supposedly the inspiration for the title of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire , and lends a curiously apocalyptic meaning to Game of Thrones . Will the world end in fire or ice? These images suggest various things – fire suggests rage, war, passion; ice suggests cold indifference and passivity – and can be interpreted in a number of ways, which lends this classic short poem an ambiguity and deep symbolic quality.

The elements of fire and ice mentioned in the poem, and foregrounded in its title, are two of the four Aristotelian or classical elements, along with earth and air (although ‘ice’ is usually just described as water, Frost – whose very surname here summons the icy conditions of one half of the poem – is purposely summoning these classical elements). Frost wrote ‘Fire and Ice’ in 1920 . This is just two years after the end of the First World War, and a time when revolution, apocalypse, and social and political chaos were on many people’s minds.

7. ‘ Mowing ’.

Hard work, they say, is its own reward. This short poem, which contains fourteen lines but is not a sonnet, is a meditation on the act of mowing the grass with a scythe. What sound does the scythe make? What does it whisper? Frost concludes that it is ‘the sweetest dream that labor knows’ – the scythe ‘whispers’ as it performs its work.

8. ‘ Desert Places ’.

Using the rhyme scheme and quatrain form of the rubaiyat – most familiar to English readers in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám – ‘Desert Places’ takes a snowy nature scene as its setting, like ‘Stopping by Woods’, but muses upon the deeper isolation and desertion we feel as human beings.

9. ‘ Christmas Trees ’.

Trees again! This 1916 poem is about a country-dwelling man who realises the importance of the Christmas trees on his land when a city-dweller turns up and offers to buy them from him. The poem is written in the blank verse which Frost used in many of his finest poems, to create a conversational, down-to-earth tone.

10. ‘ The Road Not Taken ’.

No list of Robert Frost’s finest poems would be complete without this, an oft-misunderstood poem . It appeared in his first collection,  Mountain Interval , in 1916; indeed, ‘The Road Not Taken’ opens the volume. For this reason, it’s natural and understandable that many readers take the poem to be Frost’s statement of individualism as a poet: he will take ‘the road less travelled’.

But is this really what this poem means? Frost’s speaker comes to a fork in the road and, lamenting the fact that he has to choose between them, takes ‘the one less traveled by’, and tells himself he’ll go back and take the other path another day, though he knows he probably never will have a chance to do so, since ‘way leads on to way’. Yet the two paths are, in fact, equally covered with leaves – one is not ‘less traveled by’ after all.

What’s more, the poem is titled ‘The Road Not Taken’, making it clear to us that it is this  road – not the apparently ‘less traveled’ one that the speaker chose – which is really on his mind. And so the famous final lines are less a proud assertion of individualism and more a bittersweet exploration of the way we always rewrite our own histories to justify the decisions we make. It remains a great poem, however – perhaps Robert Frost’s greatest of all.

About Robert Frost

Robert Frost (1874-1963) is regarded as one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century. And yet he didn’t belong to any particular movement: unlike his contemporaries William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens he was not a modernist, preferring more traditional modes and utilising a more direct and less obscure poetic language. He famously observed of free verse, which was favoured by many modernist poets, that it was ‘like playing tennis with the net down’.

Many of his poems are about the natural world, with woods and trees featuring prominently in some of his most famous and widely anthologised poems (‘The Road Not Taken’, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, ‘Birches’, ‘Tree at My Window’). Elsewhere, he was fond of very short and pithy poetic statements: see ‘Fire and Ice’ and ‘But Outer Space’, for example.

Robert Frost was invited to read a poem at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961. However, as he prepared to read the poem he had written specially for the occasion, ‘For John F. Kennedy His Inauguration’, Frost found he was unable to read the words of his poem on the paper, so bright was the glare of the sun. So instead, he began to recite one of his earlier poems, from memory: ‘The Gift Outright’. Most critics agree that ‘The Gift Outright’ is a superior poem to the inauguration poem Frost had written, and ‘The Gift Outright’ is now more or less synonymous with Kennedy’s inauguration.

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10 thoughts on “10 of the Best Robert Frost Poems Everyone Should Read”

Robert Frost seems phenomenal to me and the apparent lack in him being prolific leaves us with so little of his brilliant poetry! I love this post :)

Humbly I should say I’m more interesting than Robert the Frost

What a great list! I have to admit that I was really only familiar with one of these poems so it’s great to encounter more of Frost’s work in this way. :)

His best poem IMO is The Death of the Hired Man. :)

My favorite poet!! Thank you for this wonderful post.

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Thank you . Loved x

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A trip to Middlebury/Ripton, Vermont to the Robert Frost Trail is well worth the trip.

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“You Want to Possess the Words”: Jay Parini on Why We Can’t Stop Reading Robert Frost

Robert Frost in 1943 (Eric Schaal / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images)

More so than with almost any other American poet, Robert Frost’s lines have a way of getting stuck in your head. Whether encountered in a school assignment or a dramatic reading in a movie , his voice strikes your ear with the familiar sound of vernacular speech, then burrows deeper, becoming stranger and more complex the more you mull it. Months or years later, his words might bubble up in your mind unbidden, somehow richer and more meaningful than you remember.

Robert Frost: Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart by Jay Parini

As Jay Parini, Frost biographer and author of the recently published Robert Frost: Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart , noted in a recent LOA LIVE event , “Frost gives us a language that’s appropriate to our experience again and again.” Not just the grandfatherly figure of a bygone pastoral New England that he cultivated in his public persona, Frost was also a writer of immense but understated wisdom and intricacy, equally capable of rendering sublime scenes of nature and humbler portraits of human grief in his poems. Even his shortest works are worlds within worlds, spinning out fresh revelations with each re-reading and encouraging us to make them a permanent part of our inner lives.

Below, Parini talks about the benefits of memorizing verse, why one critic famously called Frost “a terrifying poet,” and where to turn next once you’ve committed your first sixteen poems to heart.

LOA: Many readers encounter Frost for the first time as students through works such as “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “The Road Less Traveled.” What makes his poetry worth returning to?

Jay Parini: Frost always thrills attentive readers with his gorgeous phrasing and perfect timing in the poems. I find myself dazzled and surprised by even the old chestnuts again and again. There are depths that keep yielding new insights. I never get to the bottom of a Frost poem. He claimed to have an “ulteriority complex,” and that is what makes the work so strangely open to new readings.

LOA: You’ve taught Frost for many years. What has that been like?

JP: I’ve taught Frost to thousands of students over fifty years of college teaching. They’re almost always hooked, impressed by his memorable language, his deeply human way of engaging a reader. “Home Burial,” for instance, always shocks students. But especially “Out, Out—” never fails to elicit a gasp from first-time readers. That ending shakes them to the core: “No more to build on there. / And they, who were not the ones dead / Turned to their affairs.”

LOA: In your introduction, you speak about the value of memorizing a poem. “A good poem is a prayer,” you say, “and—like prayer itself—it brings us into conversation with eternity.”

JP: Memorization is what brings me to the language of the poems in the middle of the night, on a long drive, on a run through the woods. You don’t want the interference of a cell phone. You want to possess the words, to own them. Only memorizing a poem will offer that.

Think about actors. They get used to memorizing vast passages. It’s not hard. You just read it aloud again and again, then—like an actor in rehearsal—you go “off-book,” recite. You fail, then try again. It only takes a few times and you have it.

Robert Frost in 1941 (Library of Congress)

LOA: Frost did not achieve public recognition until he was almost forty, and yet today he is among the most well-known and widely read poets in English. How would you summarize Frost’s literary trajectory? 

JP: Frost isn’t a poet who has much of an arc. From start to last, he’s Frost. Maybe during the Great Depression you get a few poems keyed to the era: “Two Tramps,” “Provide, Provide,” “New Hampshire.” For the most part, there isn’t a lot of development, although a late poem, “Directive,” is a kind of summary work, one that brings all his gifts to bear in one long poem of extraordinary depth.

Memorization is what brings me to the language of the poems in the middle of the night, on a long drive, on a run through the woods.

I don’t like much of the very late work: it’s often jokey and not like the great poems. But he started with such a bang, with North of Boston . Hard to beat that.

Frost is one of the three great modern American poets: Eliot, Stevens, and Frost. Frost is the most American of them all, focused on the speech and people of New England. I think you’d find that Frost’s voice has quietly rippled through poets of great strength, such as Richard Wilbur or Seamus Heaney. Heaney was a close friend of mine, and he told me that Frost was probably his main influence.

LOA: Speaking at Frost’s eighty-fifth birthday celebration, the critic Lionel Trilling said (to Frost’s surprise and displeasure), “I regard Robert Frost as a terrifying poet.” It’s an often-quoted observation. What did Trilling mean by that, and why did Frost take offense?

JP: I think Frost was afraid of his dark side. He waited a long time for the acclaim that came in abundance in his later years. He was a wisecracking, avuncular figure on the platform, and he gave endless readings to large crowds. They didn’t want to be frightened by poetry. As a result, he never read aloud certain amazing poems, such as “The Subverted Flower.” He tended to read more cozy poems, such as “Mending Wall” and “The Road Not Taken” or “Birches.”

But it’s hard to go very far into Frost without seeing the dark side, as in “Acquainted with the Night,” “Provide, Provide,” or “Design,” which contains the line: “What but design of darkness to appall?” His best work is chilling. There’s not much comfort in Frost, although nature does speak to him, and to us, through him. And there is some assurance there.

Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays

LOA: It must have been difficult whittling down Frost’s oeuvre to sixteen poems to present in this book. What narrowly missed the cut?

JP: Frost left behind fifty or so great poems. I hated to lose “Provide, Provide,” “The Subverted Flower,” “The Most of It,” “The Silken Tent,” and so forth. All great poems. But I went with the most obvious and most popular of his poems. The essential poems.

Readers looking for more should simply see Library of America’s collected Frost edition and live in the pages, even the letters and essays.  Frost was a splendid writer of essays. “The Figure a Poem Makes” needs to be read.   

Jay Parini, the D. E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College, is a poet, novelist, biographer, and critic. He is the author of Robert Frost: A Life , Why Poetry Matters , and Borges and Me: An Encounter , among many other works of nonfiction. His books of poetry include New and Collected Poems , 1975–2015 and The Art of Subtraction .

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Robert Frost: Poems

By robert frost, robert frost: poems essay questions.

What is the "sound of sense," and why does Robert Frost use it in his poetry?

The "sound of sense" is a literary theory in which specific syllables and sounds are used to express the subject of a poem in a visceral way. For example, in the poem "Mowing," Frost selects certain terms (such a "whispering") in order to convey an aural sense of the swishing motion of the scythe as it cuts the hay. Frost is very concerned with the clarity and expression of his poetry, particularly in terms of the topic that he is discussing. By using the "sound of sense," Frost is able to layer additional meaning onto each of his works. Instead of absorbing the meaning of the poem solely through visual means, a reader is able to feel and even hear the meaning of the poem on a deeper level.

Why does Frost choose to write about everyday life in a rural environment? What is the effect of this choice on his poetry?

Frost is a major advocate of "reality" in terms of his poetry as a means of discovering greater metaphysical truths. By writing about everyday life instead of imaginary worlds, he is able to layer the basic meaning of his poems over more metaphorical ideas. For example, a poem about taking a sleigh ride through the woods ("Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening") can also be about the threat of death in the changing seasons and the traditional expectations of duty. In this way, his poems may seem to be simplistic on a cursory level, but they are actually multi-faceted in terms of their meaning and appeal. As a result of this choice, Frost allows his readers to become individual explorers in each of his poems. Although the basic meaning of the poem may be spelled out in a clear manner, the reader is left with unending possibilities of analysis and ultimately possesses a greater connection to each poem.

How does Frost use poetic form in unusual ways?

Frost is atypical as a poet because he uses a wide variety of forms and rhyme schemes in his poetry. However, in each case, Frost does not seem to select a specific form simply for the sake of having a difficult form to work with. Instead, he carefully chooses the form that will most clearly express the idea and meaning of his poem. In that way, Frost uses form in the same way that he uses the "sound of sense"; nothing is his poems is coincidental and everything is meant to evoke a certain idea, whether it is the sound of a syllable or the motion of a rhyme scheme. For example, in "After Apple-Picking," Frost creates a specific amalgamation of traditional rhyme schemes and free verse that is meant to illustrate the narrator's constant shifting between dreaming and waking. This also allows the reader to feel the same shifting of consciousness as the narrator while they are reading. The fact that Frost is able to execute each form flawlessly, even while using it to express the meaning of his poems, reveals the extent of his literary talent.

How did Frost's personal life influence his poetry?

Because Frost's poems are based on everyday events, many of his works are largely autobiographical. Even two of his most famous poems, "Mending Wall" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," are based on specific events in his life. In many cases, Frost was able to draw inspiration from his own life for his poems and then incorporate more metaphysical themes to give each event a deeper meaning. In addition to using life events as inspiration, Frost also used many aspects of his emotional side in his poetry, such as his life-long depression, loneliness, and sadness at the deaths of so many of his family members. Because Frost places so much of himself in each of his poems, they have a personal touch that makes them particularly appealing to the reader.

How does the familiarity of Frost's poems affect an analysis of their meaning? Is it better or worse that they are well-known?

Some of Frost's poems are so famous that it can be difficult to create an individual analysis of their meaning. The poems "Mending Wall," "The Road Not Taken," and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" have been studied in so many high schools and colleges that, in some ways, it may seem as if further analysis is impossible. However, this level of familiarity can also be beneficial because it forces the reader to go beyond the basic analysis that has already been established. Since so many people have read these poems, new readers must force themselves to think deeply about Frost's intentions and challenge themselves to reveal yet another layer of meaning.

How does Frost discuss the importance of communication in his poems?

Communication is an issue that appears in several of Frost's poems as a dangerously destructive force. In "Home Burial," for example, Frost introduces two characters whose inability to communicate eventually destroys their marriage. Each character expresses their own view about the death of their child, but only the reader is able to understand each side of the argument; the husband and wife are unable to communicate directly with each other. In this way, the reader is left with the agonizing truth that the husband and wife are speaking different languages, and that the rift in their marriage can never be healed. If their child had not died, the couple might have been able to save their relationship, but the unfortunate tragedy required a level of communication that was not possible. In Frost's poems with an isolated central character, there is a similar emphasis on communication as a saving force that is denied. For example, the old man in "An Old Man's Winter Night" and the depressed narrator in "Acquainted with the Night" are both unable to communicate with those around them and save themselves from their loneliness: the old man cannot make verbal noises, while the depressed narrator is unwilling to make eye contact with the watchman. In each of these cases, communication plays a far more important role than anything else; communication with other human beings would be enough to save any of these characters if they would only allow it.

What are some of the American ideals that are explored in Frost's poems?

Considering his background in the rural communities of New England, it is not surprising that Frost incorporates numerous American ideals and traditions into his poems. One of these primary ideals is the importance of hard work above all else. For the farmers in "Mowing" and "After Apple-Picking," hard work is necessary for survival, but it also creates a unique satisfaction that cannot be felt from the trivialities of imagination. Hard work is tangible and directly linked to an individual's success and happiness in America. Frost highlights the proud idealism of this mentality, even while discussing the loss and tragedy that hard work can occasionally cause (such as the death of the young boy in "Out, Out--"). Another traditional American ideal that Frost emphasizes in his poems is the concept of duty. In "Stopping by Woods on the Snowy Evening," the narrator wishes that he could stay in the woods to watch the snow fall, but he remembers his responsibilities to those around him. Rather than indulging in his own desires, the narrator fulfills his duties to his family and to his community and makes the necessary sacrifices for their well-being.

What is the role played by God and religion in Frost's poetry?

The figure of God does not appear in the majority of Frost's poetry. Instead of traditional religion, Frost seems to have a more transcendental approach toward the issue of faith, specifically in terms of mankind's relationship to nature. There are times when Frost does suggest the presence of a higher power (such as in "Birches"), but even those references are largely metaphorical and hint at a personal relationship between the individual and the freedom of nature. In "Choose Something Like a Star," Frost takes a rather ironic position on the existence of God and quips about humanity's need to find comfort in a higher power. However, there is not an overwhelming sense that Frost has atheistic beliefs. Instead, he seems to promote a more everyday religion, one that highlights traditional American values such as hard work, duty, and communication.

Which of Frost's poems do you think is the most effective in terms of form and meaning? Why?

The answer to this essay question is highly individual, but there are certain poems in Frost's oeuvre that are particularly dramatic and powerful. One such poem is "Fire and Ice," which is far more compelling than one would imagine, given the length of the piece. The poem does not have a single extraneous syllable, yet Frost is still able to take the age-old question of the world's fate and instantly transform it into a metaphor about the emotional destruction of a relationship from either desire or hate. The equally concise poem "A Patch of Old Snow" follows a similar pattern, with Frost creating a comparison between snow and an old newspaper as a way to broach the larger topic of the loss of the past. Frost's ability to inspire a vast range of emotions and metaphors in only a few lines speaks to the potency of these poems.

Does Robert Frost deserve the praise that he has received for his poetry? Why or why not?

This question is challenging because Frost's poetry has become so ingrained in American culture that it is hard to imagine the effect that it had when it was first published. Poems such as "The Road Not Taken" and "Mending Wall" have been repeated ad nauseum by high school English teachers and graduation speakers, so much so that it is sometimes impossible to view the poems with fresh eyes. At the time of its publication, Frost's poetry - inspired by everyday life and using a variety of poetic techniques - was unique and completely American. He created a literary canon in which the struggles and triumphs of real people were elevated to the level of high art; even the most simplistic activity could contain a deeper metaphysical meaning. Ironically, Frost's successful creation of the rural American genre of poetry could be what makes him seem irrelevant in today's society: the sense of American "reality" that he revealed in his poetry has become such a fundamental part of the American sensibilty that Frost's poetry seems almost simplistic. Although people find flaws in Frost's style and choice of topic, he is still worthy of praise as America's unofficial poet laureate for having created a new approach to poetry in America.

Robert Frost: Poems Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Robert Frost: Poems is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Robert Frost as a poet Symbolisms

This is a really detailed question for this short answer space. Nature is Frost's main motif for symbolism. Frost is intetrested in the cycle of life and death shown through the seasons in a way that people can connect with. There is also the idea...

Relationship between man and woman?

In Frost's poems (particularly after 1914), he focuses on the trouble men and women have within their intimate relationships and examines the reason why many of these relationships have stagnated.

You might want to check out Gradesaver's theme...

Discuss the theme of the poem "The Road Not Taken" written by Robert Frost.

The central theme of "The Road Not Taken" revolves around the significance of human choice. Through its tone, language, and structure, the poem is able to offer multiple understandings of what it means to choose. The first interpretation of choice...

Study Guide for Robert Frost: Poems

Robert Frost: Poems study guide contains a biography of poet Robert Frost, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis of his major poems.

• About Robert Frost: Poems
• Robert Frost: Poems Summary
• "Mending Wall" Video
• Character List

Essays for Robert Frost: Poems

Robert Frost: Poems essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Robert Frost's poems.

• Nature Imagery in the Works of Robert Frost
• Robert Frost in England - A Short Biography
• An Explication of Mending Wall By Robert Frost
• The Most of It
• "Eternal Freshness of the Flawless Poem:" Why Frost's Poetry Remains Vital

Lesson Plan for Robert Frost: Poems

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Robert Frost: Poems
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Robert Frost: Poems Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Robert Frost: Poems

• Introduction
• Awards and recognition
• Legacy and cultural influence

On this day in history, March 26, 1874, American poet Robert Frost is born in San Francisco

Poetry great Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco, California, on this day in history, March 26, 1874. 

Frost spent the first 11 years of his life in San Francisco until his father, journalist William Prescott Frost, Jr., died of tuberculosis, according to Biography.com.

After his death, Frost, his mother and his sister moved in with his grandparents in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, MARCH 25, 1911, A FIRE AT THE TRIANGLE SHIRTWAIST FACTORY KILLS 146

The move was actually a homecoming for the Frosts, since their ancestors originally hailed from New England, according to Poetry Foundation.

In 1892, Frost graduated from Lawrence High School. He was named "class poet" and served as co-valedictorian with his future wife, Elinor White.

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Two years after his high school graduation, Frost’s poem "My Butterfly" was accepted by the New York Independent.

He was paid $15.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, MARCH 14, 1879, ALBERT EINSTEIN BORN IN GERMANY

In celebration, Frost printed two copies of a book of six poems called "Twilight" — one copy for himself and one for his wife.

Throughout the next eight years, Frost only had 13 additional poems published, according to Biography.com.

The poet attended Dartmouth College for several months before returning home to work at a number of "unfulfilling jobs," the website reports.

In 1897, Frost attended Harvard University. He dropped out after two years due to health concerns, returning to his wife in Lawrence.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, MARCH 14, 1869, CINCINNATI RED STOCKINGS BECOME FIRST PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL TEAM

Frost, along with his wife and two children, moved to Derry, New Hampshire , in 1900, onto a property purchased by Frost’s grandfather.

Frost’s firstborn, Elliot, died of cholera in 1900. White went on to give birth to four more children .

The youngest Frost child, Elinor, born in 1907, tragically died just weeks after birth.

The Frosts attempted to build a life on the New England farm for the next 12 years, pursuing a variety of unsuccessful endeavors including poultry farming, Biography.com reports.

Frost had two poems — "The Tuft of Flowers" and "The Trial by Existence" — published in 1906.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, MARCH 1, 1872, MAJESTIC YELLOWSTONE BECOMES AMERICA'S FIRST NATIONAL PARK

In 1912, Frost moved his family to the U.K. after American magazines consistently rejected his work, Poetry Foundation reports.

While Frost continued to write about New England even when living across the pond, he published two poetry books, "A Boy’s Will" (1913) and "North of Boston" (1914).

"North of Boston" featured two of Frost’s most notable poems, "Mending Wall" (1914) and "After Apple-Picking" (1914).

These publications allowed Frost to move back, in 1915, to the U.S. — where he was celebrated as a literary figure.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, FEBRUARY 18, 1931, AMERICAN AUTHOR TONI MORRISON IS BORN IN OHIO 

Frost met with fellow poets Ezra Pound and Edward Thomas during this time. 

They reportedly influenced Frost to write "The Road Not Taken" (1916).

This poem, as well as "Birches" (1915), was published in his book "Mountain Interval" in 1916.

Frost's reputation grew for writing poems about nature while receiving praise for his traditional lyric and meter, Poetry Foundation reports.

His next book, "New Hampshire" (1923), featured classic poems such as "Stopping by Woods on a Snowing Evening," which earned him his first Pulitzer Prize.

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In addition to writing, the poet pursued a teaching career at several colleges, including Dartmouth College, the University of Michigan and Amherst College in Massachusetts, according to Biography.com.

He taught at Amherst until 1938, when his wife died of cancer. The college’s main library is named in Frost’s honor.

Frost went on the win four Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry, as well as 40 honorary degrees.

In 1960, he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by Congress.

At 86 years old, Frost was asked to write and recite a poem for John F. Kennedy’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 1961.

On Jan. 29, 1963, Frost died due to complications from previous prostate surgery. 

He was survived by two daughters, Lesley and Irma.

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Original article source: On this day in history, March 26, 1874, American poet Robert Frost is born in San Francisco

Home › Blog Topics › Community/Teacher Collaboration › Reciting Poetry: Boosting Confidence in Teens

Reciting Poetry: Boosting Confidence in Teens

By Karin Greenberg on 05/13/2024 • ( 1 )

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

~from “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost

Poetry in Motion

When I was a child, I had to memorize poems for English class. I can still recite several by heart, including the Robert Frost one above. The practice has gone out the window with card catalogs, but it still may be useful. 

Over the past several decades, as teachers and librarians have put more emphasis on the mechanics of writing and literature, we let go of something important: the simple pleasure of rhyme and rhythm. As journalist Jim Holt says about memorizing poems, “ You begin to feel the tension between the abstract meter of the poem. . .and the rhythms arising from the actual sense of the words. It’s a physical feeling, and it’s a deeply pleasurable one” (Holt). There’s something about reciting a memorized poem that induces calm and shuts out the rest of the world for a few seconds. 

Poetry Challenge

During National Poetry Month in April, I focused on this often forgotten activity. After putting together a display of poems by various poets, I posted them in a Canvas announcement titled “April Poetry Challenge.” The instructions were:

• Recite four lines from any of the following poems to one of your teachers.
• Have the teacher sign the poetry slip.
• Bring the slip to the high school library to get your reward.

Then I bought several $5 Dunkin Donuts gift cards. Though I have a budget for favors and prizes, I often think of contests and activities last minute and have to spend my own money. As I look toward next school year, I plan to order several groups of prizes in advance to avoid this.

I didn’t know what to expect. Most students who come into the library during lunch or free periods want to relax or do work. With the lure of a gift card, though, I got dozens of participants. I didn’t require them to fully memorize the passages if they had trouble but they had to speak the lines clearly. When we ran out of gift cards I handed out books we keep for giveaways. 

Poetic Power

Two things happened: First, the students who successfully recited poetry came back into the library beaming. It was obvious they felt a sense of confidence and success. Second, those who participated seemed happily surprised as they recounted the positive reactions of their teachers. It’s not often that students and teachers have time to step away from the curriculums or required activities of their days. This short exercise let them do that in a way that benefited both. On some of the signed slips there were handwritten notes from teachers. “He was great!” said one. “Thanks for the poem” said another. There were smiley faces and thumbs up drawn in. Most endearing were the teachers who took a trip down to the library to express their support for the challenge. A few told me how happy they were to see a shy student come up to them and recite a poem. 

Will memorizing and reciting poetry make a comeback? Probably not. But I think it could play a role in the modern English Language Arts curriculum. Or, if not, it can be one of the many ways we as librarians use our creativity to supplement the subject areas in our schools.

Holt, Jim. “The Case for Memorizing Poetry.” The New York Times , 2 April 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/books/review/Holt-t.html. Accessed 7 May 2024.

Author: Karin Greenberg

Karin Greenberg is the librarian at Manhasset High School in Manhasset, New York. She is a former English teacher and writes book reviews for School Library Journal. In addition to reading, she enjoys animals, walking, hiking, and spending time with her family. Follow her book account on Instagram @bookswithkg.

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Tags: collaboration , engaging students , high school library , high school poetry , library , library activity , library games , Library Media Specialists , memorizing poems , national poetry month activity , poetry , poetry challenge , reciting poetry , school librarian , school libraries , student engagement , teenage motivation

Hi Karin, Thank you so much for sharing this information and resources! Best, Karen

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Morning Briefing: Europe Edition

Friday briefing.

Slovakia’s divided politics.

By Natasha Frost

A suspect is charged in Slovakia

An assassination attempt by a “lone wolf” who fired at least four bullets into Robert Fico, the leader of Slovakia, has put a spotlight on the Central European nation’s troubled politics.

The suspect was promptly arrested on Wednesday and charged with attempted premeditated murder, but the authorities have not named him publicly. Slovakian news outlets, citing police sources, identified him as a 71-year-old retiree with a yen for poetry and protests who the authorities said had acted alone.

Fico, the prime minister, is pushing to overhaul the judiciary to limit the scope of corruption investigations, to reshape the national broadcasting system to purge what the government calls liberal bias and to crack down on foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations. He opposes military aid to Ukraine, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the E.U.

Context: Slovakian society and political culture are so bitterly divided that the violence has become yet another club with which each side can beat the other, amid what onlookers say is extreme polarization, exacerbated by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

E.U. elections: Calls are growing in Slovakia for political parties to suspend campaigning in the wake of the attack.

Quotable: “We are on the doorstep of a civil war,” the interior minister, Matus Sutaj Estok, said. “The assassination attempt on the prime minister is a confirmation of that.”

NATO is considering sending military trainers to Ukraine

NATO allies are inching closer to sending military trainers into Ukraine at the request of Ukrainian officials. The move could draw the U.S. and Europe more directly into the war with Russia.

So far the U.S. has been adamant that it will not put U.S. troops on the ground in Ukraine, and it has urged NATO allies not to do so, either. But yesterday, Gen. Charles Brown, a top U.S. military official, said that a NATO deployment of trainers seemed inevitable, even if, for now, such a move would put the trainers at risk. “We’ll get there eventually, over time,” he told reporters.

At the front: Ukraine’s position has worsened as Russia has stepped up attacks, in particular in the northeast. Yesterday, President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to the Kharkiv region and acknowledged that the situation there “ remains extremely difficult .” “We are strengthening our units,” he added.

Israel said it would send more troops to Rafah

Defying international pressure, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, said that the country would send more troops to support its ground invasion of Rafah, a city in southern Gaza. More than a million displaced people had been sheltering there, and hundreds of thousands of civilians have already fled in recent days.

Until now, Israeli troops and tanks have made only a limited incursion into eastern Rafah, and on May 7 they seized the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, a vital entry point for aid. The crossing remains shuttered, leaving wounded and ill people who need treatment abroad with no way out, and hundreds of aid trucks piling up in Egypt.

U.S. politics: The House passed a largely symbolic bipartisan bill to rebuke President Biden for pausing an arms shipment to Israel.

MORE TOP NEWS

Donald Trump: In a Manhattan court, lawyers for the former president sought to cast Michael Cohen as a fabricator who had lied under oath to exact revenge on his former boss. (Read about the litigants’ lunch menu .)

Mpox: A deadlier version of the infectious disease formerly called monkeypox is ravaging the Democratic Republic of Congo, the C.D.C. warned.

Caribbean: As the world’s coral reefs suffer a fourth global bleaching event, heat stress in the region is accumulating earlier than in previous years , according to new data.

TikTok: The billionaire Frank McCourt, a critic of how tech companies use data, mounted a bid to buy the app .

Campus protests: Around 550 students, professors and clergy members gathered near Columbia University for an “alternative” graduation ceremony, featuring pro-Palestinian speeches.

Boston: A woman was accused of murdering her boyfriend, a police officer. The city is transfixed by the trial .

From Europe

Serbia: The government approved a contract with Jared Kushner to build a luxury hotel , drawing criticism from opposition leaders.

Diplomacy: The Russian Foreign Ministry said it was expelling Britain’s defense attaché after the British government threw out his Russian counterpart last week.

Lucy Letby: Why a 13,000-word New Yorker article about a murder case is blocked in Britain .

Paris dispatch: The Louvre is joining in the celebration for the Olympics by opening up for early-morning dance and exercise classes. Tickets sold out in a flash .

MORNING READ

For decades, Israel has systematically ignored ultranationalist Jewish violence against Palestinians in the occupied territories. A Times Magazine investigation shows how a radical ideology in Israeli society moved from the fringes to the heart of power.

In a video , the writer Ronen Bergman explains how the failure to stop crimes by Jewish settlers and ultranationalists threatens Israeli democracy. Here are takeaways from the investigation.

Lives Lived: The photojournalist Daniel Kramer planned a one-hour shoot with Bob Dylan. It turned into a 366-day odyssey, producing rare images of Dylan at home, behind the scenes on tour and in the studio. Kramer died at 91 .

CONVERSATION STARTERS

Take charge: We chatted with a psychologist about how to avoid kneejerk decisions .

Dogs at dinner: Their presence in restaurants can be a scourge or a delight. Who’s asking?

In your villain era: TikTok has spawned a curious new way of understanding ordinary life — as if it’s part of a television series.

Caring for the caregivers: For those who look after aging family members, there are more realistic tools for self-care than yoga or weekend escapes.

SPORTS NEWS

Changes afoot: Premier League clubs will vote on a proposal to abolish the video assistant referee system.

P.G.A. Championship: How Scottie Scheffler, Jon Rahm and other contenders stack up .

FIFA: A corruption scandal brought changes to soccer . Less than a decade later, the appetite for reform appears to have waned.

ARTS AND IDEAS

‘bridgerton’ is back.

Shonda Rhimes’s period costume drama “Bridgerton,” which follows eight siblings as they reckon with relationships in early-19th-century London, is now back for its third season on Netflix. Luke Newton, who plays Colin Bridgerton, above, has stepped up as co-lead, or chief hunk , and Nicola Coughlan was also promoted from supporting player to lead.

For more: With its vision of a Regency England ruled by a Black queen and an anachronistically diverse royal court, Bridgerton is among a spate of films and TV shows reimagining history as a multiracial dream world , our critic writes.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Bake: Celebrate the weekend with a regal strawberry cake .

Read: “ Henry Henry ” retells Shakespeare’s Henry V as the modern story of a gay man grappling with abuse and guilt.

Save: Nine tips to stretch your food budget .

Travel: How to spend 36 hours on the island of Minorca .

Watch: Hong Sang-soo’s “In Our Day” is a tender film about simple pleasures.

Play the Spelling Bee . And here are today’s Mini Crossword and Wordle . You can find all our puzzles here .

That’s it for today’s briefing. Have a fabulous weekend. — Natasha

Reach Natasha and the team at [email protected] .

Natasha Frost writes The Times’s weekday newsletter The Europe Morning Briefing and reports on Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. She is based in Melbourne, Australia. More about Natasha Frost