Robert Frost at Ripton — The Green Mountain National Forest Summer

Robert Frost came to the Homer Noble Farm in Ripton, Vermont, for the first time in the summer of nineteen thirty-eight. He was sixty-four years old. His wife Elinor had died that spring, and he was looking for somewhere to be that was not the places they had been together. The farm sat in a meadow below the ridge of the Green Mountains, inside what is now Green Mountain National Forest, and it became his summer home for the rest of his life.

The cabin where he worked was set apart from the main farmhouse, smaller and simpler, with a porch that looked into the trees. He wrote there through twenty-three Vermont summers, returning each year after the academic year at Dartmouth, Michigan, or wherever he was currently appointed. Vermont was where the work happened.

A quarter mile up the road from the Noble Farm, the Bread Loaf School of English has been operating since nineteen twenty. Founded as a graduate summer school in the English language and literature, it occupies the same yellow buildings that were a mountain hotel before Middlebury College acquired the campus. Frost had been associated with the School almost from its founding. He taught, lectured, and performed there for decades, a figure so central to the Bread Loaf identity that his presence was as much a feature of the summer as the weather.

What Frost found at Ripton was something he had been looking for since his years in Derry, New Hampshire, four decades earlier: a landscape that worked on him without demanding anything back. The meadow, the ridge, the particular quality of Vermont light in August. Some of his most considered late poems were written in the cabin on the Noble Farm. The farm is now owned by Middlebury College and is not generally open to visitors. The meadow is still there. The ridge is still there.