West Running Brook - WITH AUTOGRAPH QUOTATION "And miles to go before I sleep"

New York: Henry Holt and Company. 1935. 8vo. 64 pp. Green boards. Gold hued illustration patched onto the cover, gilt title & author on spine. Front free endpage inscribed with an autograph quotation of the American poet's most beloved line, signed and dated Bread Loaf, 1938. A halftone photograph of the poet has been affixed to the inner front board opposite the inscription, making for an attractive presentation. Area of staining to the signed page, not affecting any of the writing, corners of boards bent and nicked, slight fraying to spine extremities, evidence of a removed bookplate around the edge of the affixed photograph, else very good. A rare autograph example of the poet's most famous single line. 

Frost wrote his celebrated poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" in 1922, publishing it the following year in his New Hampshire volume. Describing the thoughts of a lone rider who watches snow falling at night in the woods, the poem ends with the stanza: "The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep." The meaning or "correct" interpretation of this resonant final line has been the subject of much discussion, perhaps to a disproportionate degree: when a critic once asked if the last two lines in “Stopping by Woods” referred to going to Heaven, and, by implication, death, the poet replied, “No, all that means is to get the hell out of there.”

Founded in 1926, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference is a program of Middlebury College and has been closely associated with Robert Frost since its inception; Frost lived in nearby Ripton, Vermont and attended 29 sessions. (14603)

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Autograph Document

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Literature

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