Unknown Frost Poem Comes Out From Hiding at U-Va.

Soon after, in 1918, Frost wrote "War Thoughts at Home," Stilling said.

Stilling thinks the poem resonates with the conflict Frost would have felt in reconciling stoicism about the inevitability of the war and the need to enlist and fight with the grief he felt about the death and the many other losses in Europe.

The 35-line poem, about a woman on a winter afternoon with a flurry of birds outside the window as she thinks about war, includes this stanza:

"Than the war is in France!

She thinks of a winter camp

Where soldiers for France are made.

She draws down the window shade

And it glows with an early lamp."

U-Va. has an extensive collection of Frost materials, said Michael Plunkett, director emeritus of the special collections library. And, coincidentally, a collection of letters and papers from a prominent New York editor and publisher, Frederic G. Melcher, a correspondent of Frost's, had just been bought by U-Va. when Stilling began his research.

So the materials hadn't even been catalogued yet by librarians -- a researcher's dream, replete with potential discoveries.

"This is why people spend long afternoons and evenings in archives paging through everything," Genoways said, "the prospect that there's something remarkable that just hasn't been seen yet."

In May 2005, Stilling found a letter in the special U-Va. collection mentioning an unpublished poem that had been written on a page in Melcher's copy of "North of Boston." He opened the marbled blue cover and there it was.

He went straight to the library, pulling volumes of Frost's poetry, searching for the lines to see if they had surfaced anywhere else. After months of research, including correspondence with the Frost estate, he concluded that it was, indeed, a lost work.

"Finding the poem is the easiest part," Stilling said. "Learning to understand it takes a long time."

As for Genoways, he has stopped looking. That missing stanza of his poem -- a two-inch scrap of paper he combed through archives searching for -- is, he believes, lost forever.