Acquainted with the Night
Robert Frost’s poem ‘‘Acquainted with the
Night’’ first appeared in 1927 in theVirginia
Quarterly Review, and it also appeared in his
1928 collection of poetry,West-Running Brook.
‘‘Acquainted with the Night’’ consists of four
tercets and one couplet, using terza rima for its
rhyme scheme; sometimes the poem is called a
terza rima sonnet, because it is also written in
iambic pentameter. The Pulitzer Prize-winning
collectionWest-Running Brookwas included in
Complete Poems of Robert Frost, published by
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, first in 1949 with
numerous subsequent printings. In 2002, Henry
Holt published Edward Connery Lathem’s
edition ofThe Poetry of Robert Frost: The Col-
lected Poems, Complete and Unabridged.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHYRobert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco on
March 26, 1874. When Robert was eleven years
old, his father William Prescott Frost Jr., a jour-
nalist, died of tuberculosis, and his mother Isa-
belle Moody Frost moved her son and his
younger sister Jeanie back east to Lawrence,
Massachusetts, where the family lived near
Frost’s paternal grandfather, and Isabelle Frost
worked as a schoolteacher. Frost graduated
from Lawrence High School in 1892, and he
briefly attended Dartmouth College, where he
studied Latin and Greek.
1ROBERT FROST
1927