Like most of Frost's poetry, "Stopping by Woods" adopts the tone of a simple New England farmer contemplating an everyday site. But Robert Frost was very different from the narrators he created. Long associated with New England and farming, Frost was actually born in California in 1874, where he lived until his father, a journalist, died when he was 11. His mother brought him to Massachusetts, where he graduated as co-valedictorian of his high school class. He attended Dartmouth and Harvard but didn't complete a degree at either school. Three years after high school, he married his fellow high school valedictorian, Elinor White.
Frost tried unsuccessfully to run a New England farm, and the family, which soon included four children, struggled with poverty for two decades. Frost became more and more depressed, perhaps even suicidal, and in 1912 he moved his family to England to make a fresh start. There he concentrated on his poetry and published a collection called A Boy's Will in 1913, which won praise from English