Robert Frost: 10 quotes on his birthday

Robert Frost won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times in his lifetime. He published his first poem in 1894 at the age of 21, for $15 (the equivalent of around $400 dollars today). He strived to embody the voice of the colloquial man, and most all of his poetry focuses on the Northeastern states of the US. He was the inaugural poet for John F. Kennedy, and an American icon in his own right. His poetry today is taught in schools, and it's safe to say that "The Road not Taken" is one of the most popular American poems of all time. Here are 10 quotes from this monolith of modern American poetry.

1. Free Verse

Eric Shaal/Time Life Pictures

“I’d as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.”

- Edward Lathern Interviews with Robert Frost

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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