Poetry for Students, Volume 35

appreciated and drew upon and discusses how his
poem ‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ can be inter-
preted within that tradition.

Every work of art has its context, the larger
aesthetic environment in which it holds a unique
place. One way to understand a work of art comes
from understanding its context and considering
what a given artist used or rejected in it. Robert
Frost wrote mostly during the first half of the
twentieth century, but it is safe to say he was in
form and content more closely aligned with cer-
tain nineteenth-century sensibilities and poets
who dominated much of that century. From
early childhood, Frost was taught to appreciate

romantic English poets, and it was from them

that he later drew much of his aesthetic taste.

This aesthetic value derived specifically from the

revolutionary theory of poetry explained by Wil-

liam Wordsworth (1770–1850) in his preface to

the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1802).

Wordsworth’s ballads and some poems written

later by Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) and in the

United States by such poets as Edwin Arlington

Robinson (1869–1935) and Edgar Lee Masters

(1869–1950) illustrate the kind of work with

which Frost had natural affinity.

In collaboration with Samuel Coleridge

(1772–1834), Wordsworth put forth a new literary

WHAT

DO I READ

NEXT?

 Robert Frost: A Biography(1996), by Jeffrey

Meyers, offers a reevaluation of the three-

volume biography by Lawrance Thompson,

Robert Frost: A Biography (1966–1976).

Meyers adds information to the story of the

poet’s life, which Thompson relegated to some

two thousand pages of unpublished notes.

 Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

(2001), a large-size edition beautifully illus-

trated in black and white by Susan Jeffers,

transforms the famous poem into a bedtime

storybook to be enjoyed by children and

adults alike.

 West-Running Brook(1928), the collection

of poems by Robert Frost that contains

‘‘Acquainted with the Night,’’ is included in

The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected

Poems, Complete and Unabridged, which

was edited by Edward Connery Lathem

and published by Henry Holt in 2002.

 After Frost: An Anthology of Poetry from

New England, edited by Henry Lyman and

published in 1996 by the University of Mas-

sachusetts, brings together the poems of

thirty New England poets and organizes

them according to four main themes fre-

quently explored by Frost. The anthology

illustrates how regional poets who followed

Frost have used the tradition he affirmed

and the modern themes he defined.

Annie Proulx’s collection of eleven Vermont

stories, Heart Songs and Other Stories,

which was published in 1995 by Scribner,

describes regional conflicts between new-

comers and old-timers and the haves and

have-nots, as urban sprawl encroaches on

New England farmland and threatens to

change the long-established ways of the peo-

ple whose families have for generations lived

among the Vermont mountains.

One of the Alex Award winners for 2009 is

Over and Under, a novel written by Todd

Tucker and published by Thomas Dunne

Books. Suitable for young adult readers,

the book is reminiscent of Harper Lee’s

Pulitzer Prize-winning 1961 novel,To Kill a

Mockingbird. Tucker’s regional novel is set

in 1979 and follows the summer experiences

of two fourteen-year-old boys in rural

southern Indiana. Their friendship and

exploits are set against the backdrop of a

local labor conflict, in which the boys’

fathers are involved.

Acquainted with the Night