Stopping by Woods

Robert Frost was a practicing farmer, a skilled naturalist and one of America's best-loved poets. His body of work provides a vivid and compelling narrative of New England's changing environment--though it can be hard to discern when its parts are scattered through hundreds of different poems, voices and moods. This book pieces together Frost's environmental commentary, examining his poems thematically and in a logical order. In them, homesteads are carved out of the forest, families make their living from an obdurate land, property is abandoned when it fails to sell, and plants and animals reclaim deserted farms. Frost bemoaned the loss of people from the land but also celebrated the flora and fauna that thrived in fallow fields and empty barns.