Elizabeth's Reviews > Robert Frost's Poems

I originally got in to Robert Frost via his poem Fire and Ice, which is a supposition piece of how the world is going to end. Since I enjoyed that poem so much I bought a collection of his poems on sale at the local bookstore. This book is a collection of everything from his most famous, to his most obscure poems and all the works in between. This book, I have found, is such a wonderful mentor text for teaching visualization, how to craft a setting and asking questions. As a teacher always looking for new and interesting ways to teach the material this opened a new world in terms of how to teach writing through poetry. Possibly my favorite poem in this book, of the several that I read, deals with the aspects of how to create a setting, and having the reader visualize what you are trying to write is the poem Road Not Taken.

The Road Not Taken uses such descriptive language that it makes it almost impossible for the reader to not visualize being "in" the poem. In my opinion you would have to be dead as a person to not visualize the woods, and the roads. The nature of the poem leads to the reader asking natural leading questions such as "what was down the road the author went down?", and "what could have possibly been down the other road that the author mentions missing out on?" Since this text has the questions almost built into it, it would be a good text to use when working on answering questions.

I could use the entire poem for a mini-lesson on setting, as the poem itself isn't terribly long and there are so many elements throughout the poem for setting to use. There are descriptions bout where the writer is, as well as what time of the day it is. I could also use it for visualization and take it stanza by stanza breaking it down into smaller pieces in order to analyze the sense words (the words that appeal to our senses). This would definitely qualify as a mentor text for