It makes sense to compare and contrast Allen Ginsberg and Robert Frost, as both are quintessentially American poets, despite Frost spending time in England. (Eliot was American but spent so much time in England that he is more associated with that tradition.)

Both poets wrote about American life, and both often employed a sense of humor in their work. However, Frost's poetry is far quieter, more focused on small subjects, and more conservative than Ginsberg's work. Ginsberg, in contrast, was deeply influenced by the expansive, overflowingly exuberant verse of Walt Whitman.

While Frost famously defined poetry as a "momentary stay against confusion," Ginsberg embraces the confusion and chaos of contemporary life. Ginsberg dared to push the envelope, for example, talking openly and graphically about his homosexuality in his long poem Howl. This poem led to an obscenity trial in San Francisco that won greater First-Amendment protections for literary speech.

Frost, in contrast, stuck to old fashioned forms and meter while wanting to make it new and fresh, and he was influenced by more conservative poets, such as Rupert Brooke. He was asked to read poetry at the Kennedy inauguration, a mainstream honor almost unthinkable for a daringly radical poet like Ginsberg in 1960.

While Frost documented the simple traditions of rural life of places like New England in poems such as "The Mending Wall," Ginsberg took on the garish colors and changes of 1950s America in the poem "A Supermarket in California," one that opens by invoking and then imitating and parodying Walt Whitman:

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

He goes on the write,

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!

In contrast, "The Mending Wall" quietly evokes a New England tradition of neighbors repairing a stone wall between their properties in spring:

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.