![]() Like Frost's poetry, the effect of these places is restrained, but powerful. There is no profusion of hotels or restaurants, or even any brochures about the area. In fact, the trail and picnic area are easily missed if you're traveling in anything but low gear, and the road to his farm is not even marked. ![]() There is nothing commercialized or exploitative about the use of Frost's name here. Perhaps more significantly, the Long Trail passes near here: the south-north hiking route from the Massachusetts to the Canadian borders, part of the Appalachian Trail system that Frost and other Vermonters have hiked with cultic reverence, as a way to demonstrate loyalty to the soil and "country things." Designated by the Governor as Robert Frost Country in 1983, it includes a Robert Frost Wayside picnic area, a Robert Frost Interpretive Trail, a Robert Frost Memorial Drive, the Bread Loaf School of English that Frost cofounded and the farm where he lived. Still, it is the Ripton area in the Green Mountain National Forest, Frost's summer home for 39 years, where the poet and his favored landscape become truly inseparable. With a small population that retains its agricultural base, in addition to strict environmental statutes that include the outlawing of roadside billboards, much of the Vermont countryside really does evoke lines from Frost. Frost's words, like sharpened farm implements, sifted meaning from this both severe and tender physical reality. He ended his Pulitzer Prize-winning poem, "New Hampshire," with the ironic words, "At present I am living in Vermont."īecause Frost was a farmer first, poet second (he owned five farms, all in Vermont), his poems are more than rooted in the state's landscape, they are the landscape: its stony and frugal soil, its sculptured, shimmering green glens bespeaking a timeless and mystical perfection, and its early winter melancholies. His ashes lie beneath the ground in Old Bennington. ![]() ![]() Frost wrote much of his verse in a log cabin in Ripton in central Vermont. IN 1920, 44-year-old Robert Frost moved from New Hampshire to Vermont "to seek a better place to farm and especially grow apples." For the next four decades, Frost lived principally in Vermont, becoming the official poet laureate of the Green Mountain State. ![]()
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