Robert Frost wrote his most successful poetry much later in life.
I like that.
How often we forget that it – more often than not – takes time and patience to do anything well.
Of course, I think it’s also possible that grief and pain changed Frost’s voice as time went on.
After losing both parents, Frost later buried his wife – and then outlived four of his six children.
I can’t even imagine that.
Robert Frost wrote none of his most reproduced poems in his twenties and just 8 percent in his thirties, finally blossoming in his forties and again in his sixties. “Step by step,” poet Robert Lowell observed, Frost “tested his observation of places and people until his best poems had the. . . richness of great novels.” Like an explorer, Frost gathered material by venturing out into the world, listening carefully to real conversations. “I would never use a word or combination of words that I hadn’t heard used in running speech,” Frost acknowledged.
-Adam Grant, Originals