Henry David Thoreau's Walden is an American classic and was one of Frost's favorite books, which he reread often throughout his lifetime. Like this poem, it deals with a time the author left society for the New England forest, except that in Thoreau's case it was not for a few minutes but for a few years. New editions have consistently been published since the first printing in 1854.

To explore the directions that more experimental poets such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams were taking poetry into in the 1920s, see Stanley K. Coffman's Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry. Published in 1951 and reprinted in 1972, this book scarcely mentions Frost, but gives theoretical and biographical information about his peers that makes Frost's individualism come into focus.

In Robert Frost Himself, Stanley Burnshaw draws on personal reflections of conversations, documents, letters, and the author's poems to present his biography. Much of this is thorough and interesting, although sometimes Burnshaw goes a little too far to rescue Frost's image from remarks made by the poets official biographer, Lawrence Thompson. Published in 1986.

Cleanth Brooks was one of this century's most respected literary critics and theorists. His 1939 book Modern Poetry and the Tradition, revised in 1967, explains the complexity of Frost's poetry and places it in the context of the poets who preceded him and his peers.