But here the speaker travels by horse and carriage. Frost once said coyly, “I guess I’m not a nature poet, I have only written two poems without a human being in them.” The speaker finds himself out alone in the evening, as in so many of Frost’s poems, including the opening poem, “Into My Own,” in his first collection, A Boy’s Will. The poem is not simply a description of a natural scene but is about a person experiencing the scene. Some readers would maintain that to them it means much more than that. He said that all it means is that “it’s all very nice but I must be getting along, getting home” (Cook, 64). It means enough without its being pressed,” meaning, of course, that it should not be overanalyzed or overread. He also said of the poem, “That one I’ve been more bothered with more than anybody has ever been with any poem in just pressing it for more than it should be pressed for. He claimed it came to him when he went outside to look at the sun after he had been working all night on “New Hampshire.” Frost said, “I always thought was a product of autointoxication coming from tiredness” (Cook, 66). Kennedy’s campaign for president, Kennedy had a set speech, which he always ended by quoting the final lines of the poem about having promises to keep and “miles to go before I sleep.” Lawrance Thompson recalls the “odd juxtaposition of the tight lyric form, with its unusual rhyme scheme, and the sprawling, discursive conversational tone of ‘New Hampshire’ ” (238).įrost once told his friend Reginald Cook that the poem contained all he ever knew (Parini, 212).

It is almost always included in anthologies and was second only to The Road Not Taken as the poem respondents said they most liked to read when former American poet laureate Robert Pinsky took his 1998 poll to try to identify America’s favorite poem. It retains great popularity among the general public as well as among scholars. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is one of Frost’s most beloved lyrics.

Poem stopping by the woods