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Informationen zum Autor Robert Frost (1874–1963) was one of the most celebrated American poets of the twentieth century. He was awarded four Pulitzer Prizes and the Congressional Gold Medal for his poetry. David Orr is the poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review . He is the winner of the Nona Balakian Prize from the National Book Critics Circle and his writing has appeared in the New Yorker , Poetry , Slate , and the Yale Review . Klappentext Frost's early poems, selected by poet David Orr for the centennial of "The Road Not Taken" A Penguin Classics Deluxe edition For one hundred years, Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" has enchanted and challenged readers with its deceptively simple premise-a person reaches a fork in the road, facing a choice full of doubt and possibility. The Road Not Taken and Other Poems presents Frost's best-loved poem along with other works from his brilliant early years, including such poems as "After Apple-Picking," "The Oven Bird," and "Mending Wall." Award-winning poet and critic David Orr's introduction discusses why Frost remains so central (if often misunderstood) in American culture and how the beautiful intricacy of his poetry keeps inviting generation after generation to search for meaning in his work. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. Introduction In the later stages of his strange, illustrious, and very long career, Robert Frost was often talked about as if he were two different poets, or possibly even two different people—a phenomenon that continues even now, half a century after his death in 1963. The first poet is the familiar New England icon, the salty, no-nonsense dispenser of rustic wisdom whose lines have the sturdiness and warmth of hearthstones knelt upon by generations of yeoman farmers. This Frost is the Robert Frost of the common reader, the Frost of birches and fields and snow and spring pools. He writes plain poems that make plain sense, or seem to. Those poems often rhyme, and when they do, they do so forthrightly ( deep and sleep , for instance). They’re frequently about the quotidian lives of farmers, day laborers, mill workers, and other small-time folk at the beginning of the twentieth century. Their stanzas slat tidily together, like the corners of log cabins, and their most memorable lines are the sort of homely epigrams you might find crocheted on throw pillows: “I took the one less traveled by”; “Good fences make good neighbours”; “But all the fun’s in how you say a thing.” This Robert Frost feels a bit old-fashioned, maybe, but in the way that George Washington seems old-fashioned, or pilgrim hats on Thanksgiving. He’s part of the bedrock of the American identity. The second Frost—“the other Frost,” as Randall Jarrell described him in 1953—is nearly the opposite of the first. This Frost is dark, manipulative, and withholding. His poems are often about madness or violence, and their seemingly stable surfaces are sheets of ice through which the unwitting traveler can easily plunge into frigid water. This Frost was no provincial farmer-poet, but rather a ruthlessly competitive and immensely erudite artist who was far more widely traveled than peers often considered more cosmopolitan, like Wallace Stevens. This Frost is the Frost of the sophisticated reader and, more specifically, the academic reader. Understanding this Robert Frost usually entails rejecting the first Frost as a pretense (“the great ...
