A Witness Tree
1942 collection of poetry
A Witness Tree is a poetry collection by Robert Frost, most of which are short lyric, first published in 1942 by Henry Holt and Company in New York. The collection was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1943.
Background
This collection was published after several unfortunate tragedies had occurred in Frost's personal life, including his daughter Marjorie's death in 1934, his wife's death in 1938, and his son Carol's suicide in 1940. Despite these losses, Frost continued to work on his poetry and eventually fell in love with his secretary Kay Marrison, who became the primary inspiration of the love poems in this collection. This collection is the last of Frost's books that demonstrates the seamless lyric quality of his earlier poems. The most popular poem of this volume is "The Gift Outright", which was recited at the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961.
The book is 42 poems in length, and it is broken into five sections "One or Two," "Two or More," "Time Out," "Quantula," and "Over Back." In the book, Frost is interested in race, mortality, religion, science, and philosophy. The imagery is drawn from the natural world and from the ordinary, as is the case in "All Revelation," in which Frost demonstrates the revelation inside a head-tilt ("a head thrusts" (14)). Something small, a rock, a leaf, a head-tilt, inspires epiphanic turns in the poems, which often utilize the form and rhyme of a sonnet. For example, three of the five sections begin with a sonnet.
“A Witness Tree” enters the record as 1942 collection of poetry. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Witness, Tree and poetry can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16886694. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1942, 1943, 1934 and 1938.
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This entry incorporates text from “A Witness Tree” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.