Robert Frost

• He had a commitment to farming and led a simple rural life away from the distractions of urbanity
• He took rural walks with the British poet Edward Thomas; the Road not Taken was a catalyst for Thomas' decision to fight in WW1 which led to his death in 1917
• The Runaway focuses on the speaker's encounter with a Morgan colt. The depiction of this ostensibly simple encounter can be interpreted as a wider meditation on the tensions between man and nature and society's conflicted attitudes towards its youth
• Mending Wall is a reflection on humanity's impulse to build physical, psychological and political barriers. He reflects on the futility and impermanence of such barriers but concludes that people will continue to construct and maintain them regardless of the fact they won't last
• Mending Wall was published around the start of WW2 - a subtle comment on the problems caused by barriers and boundaries between countries during a time of escalating political tension
• Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening is an extended metaphorical exploration of the tension between the order and responsibilities of civilisation vs liberation, beauty, disorder and anger associated with nature
• The woods in Stopping by Woods could represent the speaker's attraction towards the oblivion - allegorical manifestation of the psychologist Sigmund Freud's concept of Thanatos or the subconscious death drive which he outlined in 1920
• Mowing uses the rural New England landscape as the basis for a philosophical exploration of the nature of truth and the relationship between man and land. The value of physical labour relates to Frost's own commitment to farming and his decision to lead a simple, rural life away from the distractions or urbanity
• The Road not Taken is an extended metaphor of a fork in the road which explores regret, indecision and tension between conventional and unconventional lifestyle choices. This poem was the catalyst for Thomas' decision to fight in WW1 which led to his death
• Out, Out has a detached prosaic tone which reflects stoical Puritan attitudes to tragic suffering associated with people in rural New England. The poem reflects a typical Modernist sense of social alienation within increasingly atomised early 20th century societies