He chose the path less traveled by. When Frost's poems were introduced in America (he first published in England), Ezra Pound and TS Eliot were still trying to figure out what modern poetry should sound like. But by then Frost knew what his should sound like, a unique style that was neither modernist or traditional. Writing almost exclusively in conversational New England vernacular, what mattered most was stringing together the right words in the correct order to achieve the precise meter each poem demanded to become alive. And that made all the difference.

The Most of It

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff's talus on the other side,
And then in the far distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush—and that was all.