Robert Frost died when I was in high school. An English teacher gave me a book of his poems to read.

Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874 but is forever identified with Vermont and New England. His brilliant poetry captured the feel of nature and winter and a lot of other things in new and lasting ways.

When I first read a Frost biography, I discovered that he has published his first poem in his high school magazine, (My Butterfly, An Elegy), for $15.  He became famous for his poems about rural New England, but he was poor and had to work all kinds of odd jobs to support his family.

He outlived four of his six children, all of whom are buried alongside him in the First Congregational Church Cemetery (The Old Bennington Ceremony)  in Bennington, Vt.

I knew he was buried nearby in Bennington and always meant to pay him a visit and say hello and goodbye. I didn’t get there until today. I just woke up with this voice in my head saying “you need to do this today.”

Maria, who is always up for any creative adventure, came with me, and we sat quietly on a bench next to his gravesite.

Robert Frost’s famous poems are familiar to almost everyone, so I don’t need to repeat them here. But I was sniffing around online today and found some quotes from him that I had not seen or read before.

I wanted to share some of them with you.

“The rain to the wind said, ‘you push and I’ll pelt.’ They so smote the garden bed that the flowers actually knelt, and lay lodged – though not dead. I know how the flowers felt.”

“Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.”

“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”

“There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was  not also tender and compassionate.”

“I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand. I teach in order to learn.”

—

I feel especially close to Frost’s poems living in the country.

He often searched for dark meditations on universal themes and believed poetry should be written in language as it is actually spoken, one reason so many people – including me –  found his works more accessible than many poets.

Frost often used the New England setting – especially winter – to explore complicated philosophical and social themes.

Like me, he was a newspaperman who looked for better ways to express himself. We didn’t have much else in common, but I always think of him in the rural landscape and the rural winter, which he had a genius for capturing.

There is something dark and troubling in the winters up here, he caught that in his poems. They are getting warmer now but they still challenge the soul in the dark days of December and the bitterly cold days February and March. Spring never feels sweeter than when you live in the North Country.

Frost taught for a long time, and he always advised his writing students to bring the feeling and notion of human voices to their writing.

I must have heard about this or read something he wrote because I always told my writing students the same thing: close your eyes when you write and make sure you can hear human voices. If the reader can hear them too, you’re home.

I visited Frost’s house in North Bennington once, but I found it cold and spare, I couldn’t feel anything of the man or the poet in there. Sitting in the Bennington Cemetery by his gravesite, I felt closer to the poet.

It did jar me a bit to think I was sitting a few feet from his body, maybe the air I breathed there would feel different. It didn’t.

The New Literary Journal said of Frost that since the nineteenth century, American poetry developed into two main streams. The first was the free and pulsating verse of Walt Whitman, the second started with the innovation of Emily Dickinson.

“Frost owes a little to both traditions,” the magazine said, “though he has, on the whole, tended to work from an earlier tradition and ended up creating a tradition of his own.”

Frost inspired me to read poetry and even love some of it.

It was good to see him today and say hello. And of course, goodbye. I wondered what he would make of rural Vermont today, I think it still has some of the magic he captured in his poems.

It’s too long to reprint here, but if you want to see what Frost meant about writing in human voices, I’d recommend “The Death Of The Hired Man.”

I think it was his sensitivity to other human beings – Silas in this case –  that touched me and so many other people about him. But have some tissues nearby.