![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() But I understood the images I think all of my classmates in near-tropical New Orleans did. It’s full of winter images, which, because I grew up in New Orleans, were for me generally something seen only in pictures and movies. When I was in high school, I liked to think that the last two stanzas were from the perspective of the horse. It is a startlingly, and perhaps deceptively, simple poem: But it was an enormously influential poem, and even Frost considered it that way, having told fellow poet Louis Untermeyer (who was poet laureate consultant to the Library of Congress in 1961) that the poem was “my best bid for remembrance.” I don’t know if “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is still included in textbooks today. (One American literature teacher I had in high school had us read Frost first, and then start at the chronological beginning.) If that poem alone wasn’t enough, a second Frost poem sealed the contract: “ The Road Not Taken.” For tens of millions of Baby Boomers, Robert Frost, and these two poems in particular, were our first definition of poetry. American poetry meant Robert Frost, and Robert Frost meant “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I don’t think I ever heard from a teacher (or read in a textbook) anything about the context of the poem, but context didn’t matter. When I was in junior high and high school, there was one poem that had managed to find its way into all of the textbooks for American literature: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost. ![]()
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