Robert Frost Trivia
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94 free Robert Frost trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Robert Frost trivia quiz covers America's most honoured poet, from a San Francisco childhood most people forget to a reading in the glare of John F. Kennedy's inauguration. The easy questions are ones anyone who met Frost in school can attempt: the poem about two roads, the woods that are lovely, dark and deep, the neighbour who says good fences make good neighbours, how many Pulitzers he won and which state he is identified with. From there it moves through the life: Lawrence, Dartmouth for two months, the Derry farm, the years in England, A Boy's Will and North of Boston, Amherst, Bread Loaf and Vermont. The harder end is for poetry lovers: Edward Thomas and the real road not taken, the Rubaiyat stanza of Stopping by Woods, Dante and Harlow Shapley behind Fire and Ice, terza rima in Acquainted with the Night, the Macbeth echo in Out, Out, the sound of sense, tennis without a net, his 31 Nobel nominations, the Congressional Gold Medal, the trip to meet Khrushchev, the epitaph about a lover's quarrel with the world and Nothing Gold Can Stay's afterlife in The Outsiders. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on Frost, his poems and his places before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our famous poets, American literature and 20th-century poetry quizzes next.
30 of 94 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Robert Frost born?
San Francisco
San Francisco was home until his father died of tuberculosis, and his mother then moved the family across the country to Massachusetts.
Q 02What sent Frost and his family home from England to America?
The First World War
The First World War sent him home in 1915; he had left without a book to his name, and his second soon became an American best-seller.
Q 03In a famous Frost poem, who 'must think it queer' to stop without a farmhouse near?
His horse
His horse stands in midwinter snow, yet Frost wrote the poem on a June morning in 1922 after staying up all night over another, longer poem.
Q 04Which poem did Robert Frost warn audiences was 'a tricky poem, very tricky'?
The Road Not Taken
The Road Not Taken began as a gentle tease about a friend who always regretted his choice of path, but some read it as praise for bold choices.
Q 05Which British poet, an indecisive walking companion, inspired Frost's poem about two diverging roads?
Edward Thomas
Edward Thomas took the poem personally, and some think it helped tip him into enlisting; he was killed at Arras in 1917.
Q 06Before fame came, Frost wrote articles for farm trade journals about raising what?
Poultry
Poultry farming never paid well, so by 1906 Frost had turned to teaching English to support his growing family.
Q 07Frost's poem about pausing beside snowy woods on the darkest evening of the year borrows which verse form?
The Rubaiyat
Edward FitzGerald adopted the form from Omar Khayyam; the poem is in iambic tetrameter.
Q 08In which Frost poem does a neighbour twice repeat his father's saying about what makes good neighbours?
Mending Wall
Mending Wall's speaker doubts the wall is needed, yet he is the one who calls his neighbour out to rebuild it each spring.
Q 09Fire and Ice was reportedly inspired by a passage in which work, where traitors are frozen in the lowest circle of hell?
Dante's Inferno
Astronomer Harlow Shapley also claimed to have inspired it with a talk about how the world will end.
Q 10Frost's nine-line poem about how the world will end influenced the title of which fantasy series?
A Song of Ice and Fire
A Song of Ice and Fire was first planned as a trilogy, but George R. R. Martin had published five books by 2011.
Q 11Which Frost poem does Ponyboy recite to Johnny in S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders?
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nothing Gold Can Stay echoes after Johnny dies, when his farewell letter urges Ponyboy to 'stay gold'.
Q 12Complete Frost's line: 'the best way out is always' what?
Through
Through is a husband's advice to his worn-out farm wife, and in the poem it is no comfort: she agrees only because she can 'see no way out but through'.
Q 13What was the original title of Frost's poem about a boy riding bent trees down to the ground?
Swinging Birches
Swinging Birches drew on Frost's own boyhood, when he climbed and swung on birch trees himself.
Q 21What did Frost do with his own copy of Twilight after its cool reception?
Destroyed it
Destroyed it: Frost thought he had lost Elinor White, yet she married him the following year.
Q 22Frost quit college after less than a term, saying he was needed to take over what?
His mother's unruly class
His mother's unruly class brought him home to teach, and he drifted through odd jobs such as trimming lamps in a woollen mill.
Q 23Where was the farm that Frost worked for nine years from 1900?
Derry
The Derry farm left Frost a failure as a farmer, yet many poems of his first two books were written there.
Q 14Which Frost poem calls home the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in?
The Death of the Hired Man
The Death of the Hired Man ends when Warren goes in to see the old farmhand Silas and comes back to tell Mary he is dead.
Q 15Frost's poem Out, Out, about a boy killed by a buzz saw, takes its title from which Shakespeare play?
Macbeth
Macbeth's 'Out, out, brief candle' mourns how short life is, and Frost's poem ends with the family, not the one dead, turning back to their affairs.
Q 16Frost's Acquainted with the Night has fourteen lines like a sonnet but uses which verse form?
Terza rima
Terza rima is especially hard to sustain in languages less rich in rhymes than Italian, the language in which it was invented.
Q 17What was the title of Frost's first book of poetry, published in London in 1913?
A Boy's Will
A Boy's Will found a London publisher after American magazines had kept rejecting his poems.
Q 18Which Irish poet called Frost's first book the best poetry written in America for some time?
W. B. Yeats
W. B. Yeats praised it, yet the book had no American edition until Henry Holt brought one out in 1915.
Q 19Frost's father named his son after which famous Robert?
Robert E. Lee
Robert E. Lee was the father's hero: a Northerner with Southern sympathies, he had wanted as a youth to join the Confederate army.
Q 20Which expatriate American poet reviewed Frost's first two books, though Frost resented his meddling?
Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound later needed Frost's help: in the late 1950s Frost worked to free him from a federal mental hospital.
Q 24Who paid for the farm that Frost and his young family moved to in 1900?
His grandfather
His grandfather's will held back the deed for ten years; once the farm was his, Frost sold it and took his family to England.
Q 25Robert Frost's old farmhouse in Franconia is now a museum and poetry centre known as what?
The Frost Place
The Frost Place was bought by the town of Franconia in 1976, and in 1977 it began letting an emerging poet live and write there each summer.
Q 26At which Massachusetts college did Frost teach on and off from 1917 to 1938?
Amherst
Amherst saw Frost resign and sell his house there in 1938, after his wife's sudden death.
Q 27What did Frost call his colloquial approach to language in poetry?
The sound of sense
The sound of sense came from his conviction that the ear is the only true writer and the only true reader of a poem.
Q 28Frost famously compared writing free verse to what?
Playing tennis without a net
Playing tennis without a net was his jab at free verse; he kept to metre, setting the rhythms of speech against its regular beat.
Q 29At which Middlebury College summer school did Frost teach most summers from 1921 to 1962?
Bread Loaf
Bread Loaf drew Frost back almost every summer for over 40 years, and after his wife's death he bought a farm beside its campus.
Q 30Frost, who never finished college, joked that he had been 'educated by' what?
Degrees
Degrees, that is: more than forty colleges gave him honorary ones, so many that the hoods were stitched into a patchwork quilt.