SOURCE: Hepburn, James G. “Stopping by Robert Frost.” In Critic into Anti-Critic, pp. 15-21. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1984.

In the following essay, Hepburn discusses a variety of critical responses to “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

Many years ago, William Rose Benét called Robert Frost a “wise old woodchuck,” and more recently Lionel Trilling called him “a terrifying poet.” Trilling explained that the universe that Frost depicts is a “terrifying universe”; but even as he was speaking, Robert Langbaum was saying that “Frost takes into account nature's destructiveness, but his examples of it are seldom very frightening.” To Yvor Winters, Frost was incapable of grasping the predicament of modern man; to Hyatt H. Waggoner, he understood the predicament and made a “strategic retreat”; to James M. Cox, he “forced a clearing in the woods,” braved “the alien entanglements of experience.”¹

Consider the variety of interpretations of...