Like anyone who writes on Robert Frost, I’m indebted to the scholars and Frost devotees who have spent decades tending the poet’s legacy. Men work together, as the young Frost said, whether they work together or apart.

And I’m grateful as always to my family.

Further Reading on Robert Frost and “The Road Not Taken”

There are dozens of worthwhile books on Robert Frost. I’ve limited myself below to works that were particularly useful in this project and that I thought might appeal to general readers. I’ve necessarily excluded a number of admirable scholarly studies that are primarily engaged with other aspects of Frost (for instance, Robert Faggen’s Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin), as well as some very fine books that are no longer in print (Reuben Brower’s The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention).

WORK BY ROBERT FROST

Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson. This Library of America edition is the most reliable and comprehensive version of Frost’s writing currently available. It includes everything but Frost’s letters, so if you’re looking for an all-encompassing Frost book, this is far and away the best option. It’s only published in hardback, however, so for a paperback version of Frost’s complete poetry, you’ll have to go with the questionably edited The Poetry of Robert Frost, prepared by Edward Lathem. (For the early poems, a better option is Robert Faggen’s Early Poems: Robert Frost, which also includes a sampling from Frost’s fourth book, New Hampshire.) For a paperback collection of Frost’s prose, the best option is The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson.

The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume I (1886–1920), edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen. This is the definitive edition of Frost’s early letters. For the poet’s later correspondence, there is as yet only the out-of-print and unreliable Selected Letters, compiled by Lawrance Thompson. (And to understand why the reliability of the edition matters, consider the following example that my copyeditor, Will Palmer, and I discovered in the letter to Louis Untermeyer discussed on pages 169 and 170 of this book. In that letter, Frost writes [emphasis mine], “There are no vampires there are no ghouls there are no demons, there is no nothing but me.” In the Selected Letters, Thompson takes it upon himself to remove the “no” before “nothing,” thereby changing the line to “there is nothing but me.” It’s a much less interesting formulation, and it isn’t what Frost wrote.)

Elected Friends: Robert Frost & Edward Thomas to One Another, edited by Matthew Spencer. This volume gathers the correspondence between Frost and Thomas, allowing the reader to follow the intriguing progression of their friendship. Spencer also reproduces Thomas’s early reviews of Frost, placing them chronologically among the letters. This material is bracketed by excellent critical essays by Michael Hofmann and Christopher Ricks.