Once, during a public reading, Robert Frost was asked why he so frequently recited his poems from memory. “If they won’t stick to me,” he replied, “I won’t stick to them.”

In this keepsake edition, acclaimed poet and biographer Jay Parini has chosen sixteen of Frost’s greatest works to learn by heart. In accompanying commentaries, Parini explores Frost’s stylistic genius and imaginative power and offers insight into what each poem can tell us about one of our most beloved and enduring poets, and about ourselves.

“The goal of this little book is to encourage readers to slow down—to listen to Frost’s words and phrases, to locate their deepest rhythms, and hear the tune of each poem as it unfolds,” Parini writes in his introduction. “Memorizing a poem can teach us much about a poem’s structure and argument, and about the resonance of particular words. And best of all, memorization makes a poem part of our inner lives. Once committed to memory, a poem is available to us for recall at any time—and the occasions for remembering it will make themselves known to us. It isn’t something we have to work at.”

The poems:

Storm Fear

Mowing

Reluctance

Mending Wall

After Apple-Picking

The Wood-Pile

The Road Not Taken

Hyla Brook

Birches

Putting in the Seed

‘Out, Out—’

The Sound of Trees

Fire and Ice

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Design

Directive

Jay Parini, the D. E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College, is a poet, novelist, biographer, and critic. He is the author of Robert Frost: A Life, Why Poetry Matters, and Borges and Me: An Encounter, among many other works of nonfiction. His books of poetry includeNew and Collected Poems, 1975–2015 and The Art of Subtraction.