Wise old Vergil says in one of his Georgics Praise large farms stick to small ones Robert Frost said. Twenty acres are just about enough. Frost started out as a school teacher living the rural life of a wouldbe farmer and later turned to farming full time when he bought a place of his own. After a sojourn in England where his first two books were published to critical acclaim he returned to New England acquired a new farm and became a rustic for much of the rest of his life. Frost claimed that all of his poetry was farm poetry. His deep admiration for Virgils Georgics or poems of rural life inspired the creation of his own New England georgics his answer to the haughty 20thcentury modernism that seemed certain to define the future of Western poetry. Like the WestRunning Brook in his poem of the same name Frosts poetry can be seen as an embodiment of contrariness.