Good morning.

Today, a New England poet whose own country kept saying no… until he sailed to England in 1912 and came home famous.

Let’s begin.

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The Poet America Turned Down

Robert Frost—The Road Not Taken

N	ew Hampshire. 1912. A 38-year-old farmer and schoolteacher has been writing poems for twenty years. Almost nobody will print them.

His name is Robert Frost. He sold his first poem in 1894, for fifteen dollars, and was so thrilled that he proposed to his high-school sweetheart, Elinor. But after that, American magazines mostly sent his poems back.

That year, he tried the most respected magazine in the country, The Atlantic Monthly. The editor, Ellery Sedgwick, replied in one polite, crushing sentence.

“We are sorry that we have no place in The Atlantic Monthly for your vigorous verse.”

Ellery Sedgwick, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, 1912

So Frost took a gamble. He sold the family farm in Derry, New Hampshire, and decided to move abroad. According to a later account, the choice between England and British Columbia came down to the toss of a coin. Elinor said she would like to live under thatch.

In the autumn of 1912, the Frosts and their four children sailed for Britain and settled in Beaconsfield, a small town outside London.

Within two months, an unknown American walked into the office of David Nutt, an old London publishing house, with a sheaf of poems. Nutt accepted them. On 23 April 1913, A Boy’s Will appeared, his first book, at the age of 39.

This is the poet England discovered first.

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Robert Frost, between 1910 and 1920. Library of Congress. Public domain.

In London, the young American poet Ezra Pound took him up and reviewed him with enthusiasm. Pound also liked to tease him, and once demonstrated jujitsu on him in a restaurant, throwing him over his head.

A second book, North of Boston, followed in 1914. Its poems were full of New England farmers, hired men and neighbours, speaking in plain, everyday voices.

In England, Frost also found his closest friend, the Welsh-English writer Edward Thomas. The two men took long walks through the Gloucestershire countryside. Thomas had a habit of choosing a path, then regretting he had not taken the other one.

Frost turned that habit into a poem. It ends with the most famous lines he ever wrote.

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken,” 1915

Read it closely, though… a few lines earlier, the speaker admits that the two roads were worn “really about the same.” And he says he will tell this story later “with a sigh.” In other words, the poem that people quote as a hymn to bold choices was partly a gentle joke about a friend who could never decide.

When the First World War made life in England difficult, the Frosts sailed home in 1915. Frost arrived to find himself famous. And in August that year, The Road Not Taken was first published in America, in The Atlantic Monthly, the same magazine that had turned him down.

He went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times. In January 1961, at 86, he read a poem from memory at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, after the winter glare made it impossible to read the new one he had written for the day.

Robert Frost in 1961, the year of the Kennedy inauguration. Photo: Walter Albertin, New York World-Telegram. Library of Congress.

He died in Boston in January 1963. Today his poems are among the best known in American literature.

For years I quoted those last three lines as advice for my career, the way most people do. Then I read the whole poem aloud and heard the sigh. It made me like it more. Most of our big choices look obvious only when we tell the story afterwards.

For a sharp look at Frost the man, through his letters, the Poetry Foundation’s essay is excellent: The Man and the Manners →

The Atlantic had no place for his vigorous verse in 1912. Three years later, it printed the poem that would make him immortal… the road not taken, after all, led straight back to its door.

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Three Things Worth Knowing

I	History Edward Thomas

Frost’s friend Edward Thomas began writing poems himself, encouraged by Frost, in his late thirties. In 1915, partly after reading The Road Not Taken, he chose to enlist rather than follow the Frosts to America. He was killed at the Battle of Arras on 9 April 1917. Today he is remembered as one of the finest English poets of the First World War, and their friendship as one of the great literary friendships of the century.

II	Music Frostiana

In 1959, the American composer Randall Thompson wrote Frostiana, a set of choral pieces on seven Frost poems, for the 200th anniversary of the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, where Frost had taught. Its setting of The Road Not Taken opens the cycle. Choirs across America still sing it, especially at graduations.

III	Le Mot Juste Good Fences

“Good fences make good neighbours” comes from Frost’s poem Mending Wall (1914), and people often quote it as his advice. It is not. In the poem, it is the neighbour who repeats the old saying, while the speaker wonders why they need a wall at all. The proverb itself is far older than Frost. As with the road, the most quoted line says the opposite of what the poet meant.

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Curious & Controversial

◆	Did a coin really decide where the Frosts went in 1912? The story comes from family accounts and later retellings, and the alternative is usually given as British Columbia, where a former student lived. It is too good not to tell, but treat it as family legend.

◆	Is The Road Not Taken the most misread poem in America? Many critics think so. Frost himself warned audiences that it was a tricky poem, and he enjoyed the fact that it was so often quoted as a call to be different.

◆	Frost’s first official biographer, Lawrance Thompson, portrayed him in the 1960s and 70s as cruel and vain. Later biographers, including Jay Parini, argued that the picture was unfair and distorted. The debate over Frost the man still continues.

◆	Kennedy’s inauguration poem was an unusual honour: Frost was the first poet to read at a presidential inauguration. Since then, several presidents have followed the precedent.

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Connoisseur’s Diary

Worth Reading

Robert Frost: A Life — Jay Parini (1999). A warm, balanced biography that follows Frost from the Derry farm to England and back to fame, and takes on the darker portraits of him directly.

Where: any good bookshop or library. Insider tip: Read it alongside the poems. Frost’s early collections, A Boy’s Will and North of Boston, are in the public domain and free to read online.

Explore Further

Read: The Man and the Manners →, the Poetry Foundation on what Frost’s letters reveal.

Browse: Robert Frost →, his life, his four Pulitzers and the Kennedy inauguration.

Tonight’s Quiz

1. Which magazine rejected Frost’s “vigorous verse” in 1912?

A) The New Yorker

B) Harper’s

C) The Atlantic Monthly

D) Scribner’s

Answer: C. Its editor, Ellery Sedgwick, turned him down; three years later the magazine printed The Road Not Taken.

2. In which country was Frost’s first book published?

A) United States

B) Canada

C) England

D) Ireland

Answer: C. David Nutt published A Boy’s Will in London in April 1913.

3. Which friend inspired The Road Not Taken?

A) Ezra Pound

B) Edward Thomas

C) T. S. Eliot

D) W. B. Yeats

Answer: B. Thomas’s habit of regretting the path he had not chosen gave Frost the idea.

If the links above don’t respond in your email app, just reply with your answers—I’ll write back.

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Frost spent twenty years being told no, crossed an ocean on what may have been the toss of a coin, and found his country waiting when he came back. Sometimes the shortest road home goes the long way round.

Tomorrow, a Viennese doctor who mesmerised Paris, until Benjamin Franklin investigated him in 1784… and the word he left behind.

Until tomorrow,
Charles T. Mayfair

Editor, Connoisseur Daily

P.S. Read The Road Not Taken aloud tonight, all four stanzas. Most people only know the last one. Listen for the line about the two roads being worn “really about the same,” and the poem changes completely.