Throughout all of mankind’s history, solitude has been seen as a delicate matter. Even nowadays, living in an extremely interconnected and interdependent world as we do, all human beings have - and some even crave - their solitary moments. There are people who embrace this (seldom temporary) separateness from the world and use it for introspection, spiritual development and a variety of other practices benefiting their own selves. Others, however, do their very best to avoid solitude altogether and constantly seek the company of other people. Regardless of the preference (although for some people solitude is not much of a choice but an innate emotional need), this matter has been on the minds of people of all ages, ranks and intellectual levels. Consequently, solitude as a literary theme is present in a wide variety of literary works in world literature and particularly, in American literature. In this essay I plan to investigate how the theme of solitude is developed in several of Robert Frost’s poems, by doing a close reading of several of his poems I have selected that I believe are most relevant to the theme in question. Robert Frost is an American poet, highly regarded for the depictions of rural life and his colloquial, almost conversational writing style. His poetry often reflects a New England setting, where the poet himself spent most of his life. However, he is more than a regional poet, given the fact that much of his poetry consists of deep, complex meditations on universal themes. In fact, in many of his poems, there is a constant back-and-forth alternation between the narrative of the poem and its meditative counterpart. As for the theme of solitude, which is one of the dominant themes in Frost’s poetry, I believe it is imperative to note that it has a biographical motivation. Over the course of his life, Robert Frost suffered from nervousness and depression, much of which he attributes to a family background teeming with emotional and mental instability. In a conversation with his friend and editor Louis Untermayer, he referred to his general disposition as a disease “a loss of faith, undue retreat into one’s self, a sense of futility and a paralyzing estrangement from God and man.” Moreover, in his journal article “The Secretive-Playful Epiphanies of Robert Frost: Solitude, Companionship, and the Ambivalent Imagination”, Martin Bidney talks about Frost’s characters as perpetual pursuers of “lonely epiphanic searches”. As a result of this solitary state of his characters, many Frostian poems are rich in deep experience and emotion and offer soulful insight into any matter that is addressed in the poems. That is because solitude gives a person (in this case, a character) the opportunity to thoroughly observe and reflect upon objects, occurrences or anything else that is of interest to him. Frost’s early poems, such as the many of the ones from his first commercially published collection of poems, “A Boy’s Will” (1913), could be considered a prime example for the development of the theme of solitude in his poetry. The very first poem present in this collection, “Into My Own”, tells of a quest for independence of a young, possibly adolescent, speaker. He believes that in the isolation from the world, symbolized by the “dark trees” in the first verse, he will find himself, or more precisely, a better, more confident version of himself. Therefore, solitude in this poem is seen as necessary for spiritual development and the strengthening of beliefs. The speaker is determined to choose the path of isolation, as illustrated by the excerpt: “I should not be withheld” (Frost 5). However, he does express hope that his loved ones will look for him and that way, he can find out who truly cares for him and who does not. Another poem from the same collection that is relevant to the theme in question is “Storm Fear”, presents the speaker’s meditation on the uncert