Theme
42 poems
Robert Frost’s eight-line miniature is usually read as a soft meditation on how beautiful things fade. But its logic is stranger and bleaker: nature’s first green is already gold — the peak is the very first instant, so everything after the beginning is loss. In eight tiny lines Frost climbs from a single budding leaf to the fall of Eden to every passing dawn to an absolute law, delivered with a calm that offers almost no consolation at all.
Co-founder of English Romanticism, Coleridge gave us the haunted “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the opium dream of “Kubla Khan,” and a theory of imagination that shaped criticism for a century.
The Lake District poet who launched English Romanticism: with Lyrical Ballads he gave poetry the plain speech of ordinary life and made nature, memory, and childhood its central subjects.
The Brooklyn printer who reinvented poetry: across forty years and a single ever-growing book, Leaves of Grass, Whitman pioneered free verse and gave America its most expansive voice.
The reclusive genius of Amherst who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in near-total privacy — and, decades after her death, became one of the founders of modern American poetry.
Robert Frost (1874–1963), the four-time Pulitzer winner who kept traditional form alive in the modernist age, found whole worlds in stone walls, snowy woods, and forking roads.