Robert Frost

Poet Robert Frost’s accessible writing style was often praised during his lengthy, prize-winning career. Aware that his modernist contemporaries seemed unapproachable, Frost decided that if he was going to make a living as a poet, he had to write “for all sorts and kinds” of readers. The New England-based “gentle farmer-poet” reached millions and continues to do so. His works, especially the often-quoted and sometimes misinterpreted “The Road Not Taken” (1915), remain part of our cultural landscape.

Frost’s friend, professor of English Sidney Cox, included a variant of this photograph by Doris Ulmann in the 1929 memoir Robert Frost, Original “Ordinary Man.” Ulmann photographed Frost in New York City, where she planned to have the poet pose at a table. Since he never worked that way, Frost requested a writing board instead. In the end, Ulmann later recalled, the session was a success.