Robert Frosts The Road Not Taken

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Robert Frost, was an American poet, son of William Prescott Frost, Jr., and Isabelle Moodie, was born on 26 March 1874 in San Francisco, California. His father was a journalist, and his mother was a Scottish schoolteacher, and when Frost was eleven his father died of tuberculosis, leaving Isabelle and Robert only eight dollars to support themselves. As a result, Isabelle and Robert moved in with his grandfather William Frost, Sr., in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Robert had a strong interest in poetry and writing, publishing his first poem in Lawrence High School’s student magazine. Frost studied for a brief stint at Dartmouth College and joined the Theta Delta Chi fraternity, before leaving to ultimately work as editor of the local newspaper. In 1894 Robert frost sold his first professional poem, “My Butterfly. An Elegy,” to The Independent for fifteen dollars, and had five poems privately printed thereafter. Frost proposed to Elinor Miriam White, a former classmate from St. Lawrence University due to his recent success. He waited for her to graduate while studying liberal arts at Harvard University, and in 1895 were married and had six children: sons Elliot, Carol, and daughters Lesley, Irma, Marjorie, and Elinor Bettina. He left Harvard without graduating to move to the family farm in New Hampshire that his grandfather gave them as a wedding gift before he passed. The Frost family spent nine years on the farm, where Robert wrote some of his most well-known poems in the morning before he started his daily chores on the farm. As the farm did not provide a significant source of income, Frost began working at the Pinkerton Academy and New Hampshire Normal School as an English teacher from 1906-1912. While working he would often submit h...

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...s the other road, the one that has seen little wear during the recent years, as the road is overgrown with grass like a fresh snowy powder beckoning someone’s foot. He contemplates the possibility of taking one road now, and the other at another time, before he realizes that sometimes you have to make a decision and keep moving as you are unable to redo certain things in life. He informs us that he ultimately ended up, “taking the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference” (899). However, only later did he realize how significant such a decision would end up being in his life, and how such a minor event or decision can alter your life’s path. In his final line of the poem we are able to visualize the two roads better as he recalls they were not “equally fair,” but instead, as mentioned in the video analysis, “he recalls one road is less traveled.”

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