Robert Lee Frost was an American poet and four-time Pulitzer Prize winner (1924, 1931, 1937, 1943). He served as U.S. Poet Laureate in 1958–59. Known for his vivid depictions of rural New England life and mastery of everyday speech, Frost used natural settings to illuminate deeper truths about choice, solitude, and the human condition. "The Road Not Taken" was first published in The Atlantic Monthly, August 1915, and opened his 1916 collection Mountain Interval.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was an American-born British poet, playwright, and literary critic, born in St. Louis, Missouri. He moved to England in 1914 and became one of the defining voices of literary Modernism. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, Eliot is best known for The Waste Land (1922) — widely considered the most influential poem of the twentieth century — and Four Quartets (1943). His earlier The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) also remains a cornerstone of modern poetry.