The Ultimate Robert Frost: American Poet Quiz | Authors

Answer: yellow

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood..." Possibly a birch forest in New Hampshire in the autumn when the leaves of birch trees (the primary deciduous tree in southern New Hampshire) turn yellow. The poem was listed first in his "Mountain Interval" collection, published in 1916. It dealt with making choices and realizing one may not have a chance to reprise them.

Answer: telescope

"The Star-Splitter" is an odd poem; the narrator apparently is ready to forgive thieves operating in his town or his neighbor burning down his own house. The narrator seems to have rationalized the arson by deciding that there was little difference between a farm being lost to fire or the auctioneer's gavel.

The neighbor used the insurance money to buy an expensive telescope and coaxed the narrator to look through it. They named it the Star-Splitter "Because it didn't do a thing but split a star in two or three..." (I have no idea what that means.)

Answer: a sense of kinship

Frost wrote several poems about trees or used them as part of a story but they were usually just a prop to tell a human's tale. But in this poem he felt a kinship with the tree; he had watched the tree through his window over the years and the tree had watched him. He saw a likeness between them in that the tree was concerned with its own head being affected by the weather and the narrator being concerned with the 'weather' inside his own head.

The tree in question was a maple tree that Frost saw every day from his bedroom window; it sat on the south lawn of his farm in Derry, New Hampshire. Years after Frost died that tree did too (struck by lightning I believe); a new tree has been planted there to replace it.

Answer: The Gift Outright

Frost was the first poet asked to recite a poem at a U.S. presidential inauguration; he was personally invited by president-elect John Kennedy. Frost wrote a poem, "Dedication", for the outdoor inauguration. But the glare of the January sun off the snow was so bright he couldn't read his notes so he recited a previous poem of his, "The Gift Outright", from memory.

"Dedication" was about America's past and hopes for the future; "The Gift Outright" was about America's early days.

Answer: A Boy's Will

"A Boy's Will" was published in 1913 in England, where Frost had been living for a year. He quit his job as a teacher in the U.S. and moved his family there, determined to make a name for himself in writing. It was published by the David Nutt Company.

Some of the poems in "A Boy's Will" had been written several years before. The book was well-accepted and was published in America in 1915 by the Holt Company, which became his long-time American publisher.

Answer: baseball

The unfortunate boy lived so far from other families he had to devise games to play alone; whether they were a little destructive was a different story. Frost wrote of birch trees being bent over by the weight of ice from storms or by boys swinging on them. Birch trees do in fact bend over easily in an ice storm and often stay that way.

The narrator of the poem mused on going back to his youth when simple things like swinging on a tree were pleasant pastimes.

Answer: whisper

When Robert Frost wrote this poem (1913) most fields were mowed by hand with a scythe; tractors with mowing machines were still a bit rare (and expensive). Nor was there a lot of vehicle traffic on any nearby road, so the person mowing could hear the sounds of nature and the swish of the blade cutting hay.

The poem is about the value of necessary work and the calmness found in simple things.

Answer: False

The narrator of the poem noticed how fast-falling snow obscured everything in the area and produced a feeling of loneliness. He decided that the loneliness of the landscape didn't bother him because he had those feelings inside himself.

Frost suffered from depression and mental health problems during his lifetime.

Answer: Christmas

The poem finds the narrator trying to find some good in the fact that a boy had cut down a favorite evergreen tree of his from his property without asking and taken it home. The narrator tries to compare the good of having the tree looking beautiful on his land versus it looking good in someone's house. Frost used the poem in the 1937 Christmas cards he sent to friends.

Supposedly the idea for the poem came when Frost lived in Shaftsbury, Vermont and the neighbor's boy cut down one of Frost's favorite spruce trees and dragged it home.

Answer: Good fences

While seeming to be about two neighbors working at the simple task (unless you've had to do it) of resetting rocks in a stone wall, the poem goes more deeply into interpersonal relationships amid the concerns of everyday life.

The poem was the opener in Frost's "North of Boston" collection, first published by David Nutt in Great Britain in 1914.

Incidentally, it is estimated that there are enough stone walls in New England to circle the Earth four times.