Inspirational Quotations by Robert Frost (#677)

Today marks the birthday of Robert Frost (1874–1963,) one of America’s most famous poets. This four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize is celebrated for such popular poems as “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

Frost’s early years were difficult. After quitting Harvard University due to illness at age 25, Frost lived on a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, for 12 years. He woke up early to write poetry and then worked on the farm all day. He was not a successful farmer and his family grew destitute. Frost sold the farm and moved to Britain in 1911. There, he befriended the poet and essayist Edward Thomas; they regularly took long walks in the English countryside. Thomas’s habitual hesitancy on what path they should stroll amused Frost and inspired his best-known poem, “The Road Not Taken” from Mountain Interval (1920.)

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

In England, Frost published A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914.) The latter sold 20,000 copies and made him famous. After three years in Britain, Frost returned to America and supported himself through his readings and his writing. Frost’s other books include Mountain Interval (1916), New Hampshire (1923), A Further Range (1937), and A Witness Tree (1943).

John F. Kennedy invited Frost to recite a poem for the 1961 presidential inauguration. Frost wrote a poem called “Dedication” especially for the occasion but typed its final version on a typewriter using a dim ribbon. At JFK’s inauguration ceremony, Frost couldn’t recognize the dimly-typed lines and instead recited his well-known poem “The Gift Outright” by heart.

Inspirational Quotations by Robert Frost

Earth’s the right place for love. I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
—Robert Frost (American Poet)

Friends make pretence of following to the grave but before one is in it, their minds are turned and making the best of their way back to life and living people and things they understand.
—Robert Frost (American Poet)

You have freedom when you’re easy in your harness.
—Robert Frost (American Poet)

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.
—Robert Frost (American Poet)

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.
—Robert Frost (American Poet)

A champion of the working man has never yet been known to die of overwork.
—Robert Frost (American Poet)

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
—Robert Frost (American Poet)

The only way around is through.
—Robert Frost (American Poet)

Have courage and a little willingness to venture and be defeated.
—Robert Frost (American Poet)

By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.
—Robert Frost (American Poet)

Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.
—Robert Frost (American Poet)

Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.
—Robert Frost (American Poet)

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”—A Poem by Robert Frost

Here is Frost’s popular 1922 poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” First published in 1923 in the New Republic magazine, this was Frost’s favorite of his own poems—he identified it as, “My best bid for remembrance.”

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

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.

According to an essay by N. Arthur Bleau, Frost explained the poem’s back-story during a reading at Bowdoin College in 1947. One winter solstice, Frost felt poor enough to purchase Christmas presents for his children. He gathered some produce from his farm and rode his horse-drawn wagon into town to sell them. Unfortunately, he did not sell anything and therefore could not buy any presents for his children.

That evening, as Frost was returning home, it began to snow. His horse stopped in the middle of the woods as if it sensed his melancholy. Beset with the disgrace of not providing for his family, Frost “bawled like a baby” even as the snowflakes continued to drop into the stillness of the woods. Abruptly, the horse shook and tinkled its bells. Frost took the horse’s reaction as a reminder of the Christmas spirit and as a motivation to persist and get home to family.

Frost’s daughter Lesley later corroborated the story and quoted her father recollecting his crying, “A man has as much right as a woman to a good cry now and again. The snow gave me shelter; the horse understood and gave me the time.”

Tim Dee, writing in The Guardian, observed that “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” was the most requested poems on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please, the world’s longest-running radio show on poetry. Explaining the popularity of the poem, Dee commented, “Here are 16 short-rhymed lines recalling a moment’s pause on a horseback journey through a winter woodland. The scene is captured with economical precision. The silence of the snow is broken only once—by the jingling bells of the restive animal. We sense the fairytale terror-allure of the muted woods. And in the last three lines we are ushered towards something wider and deeper still, where the suggestion of unfinished business makes a parable and becomes incantatory.”