A Boy's Will

By Robert Frost and Mint Editions

A Boy’s Will (1913) is a collection of poems by American poet Robert Frost. Published in London and dedicated to the poet’s wife, Elinor, A Boy’s Will, which received enthusiastic early reviews from both Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats, launched Frost’s career as America’s leading poet of the early-twentieth century. Invoking such figures as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson, and Thomas Hardy, Frost ties himself to tradition while establishing his own poetic legacy, grounded in an intuitive sense of rural New England life and the subtleties of the soul.

“Into My Own,” the collection’s opening poem, reveals the poet’s strange wish to “steal away” into “those dark trees, / So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze.” Without fear, he welcomes uncertainty, ventures into it willingly, knowing it is the only way to live. In “Ghost House,” the poet enters a realm of shades and spirits, an underworld of memory where “a lonely house” has left “no trace but the cellar walls.” As he moves through this twilight landscape, encountering the “mute folk…Who share the unlit place” with him, the poet meditates on life and death, their proximity and distance, and his own sense of self within both. “Mowing” envisions the poet’s work through the prism of rural labor. “There was never a sound beside the wood but one / And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. / What was it it whispered?” The speaker does not know, but continues his task, hypnotized by its rhythm and music.

This edition of Robert Frost’s A Boy’s Will is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mint Editions
• Release date: Feb 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781513275901

Robert Frost

Robert Frost (1874-1963) was an American poet. Born in San Francisco, Frost moved with his family to Lawrence, Massachusetts following the death of his father, a teacher and editor. There, he attended Lawrence High School and went on to study for a brief time at Dartmouth College before returning home to work as a teacher, factory worker, and newspaper delivery person. Certain of his calling as a poet, Frost sold his first poem in 1894, embarking on a career that would earn him acclaim and honor unlike any American poet before or since. Before his paternal grandfather’s death, he purchased a farm in Derry, New Hampshire for Robert and his wife Elinor. For the next decade, Frost worked on the farm while writing poetry in the mornings before returning to teaching once more. In 1912, having moved to England, Frost published A Boy’s Will, his first book of poems. Through the next several years, he wrote and published poetry while befriending such writers as Edward Thomas and Ezra Pound. In 1915, after publishing North of Boston (1914) in London, Frost returned to the United States to settle on another farm in Franconia, New Hampshire, where he continued writing and teaching and began lecturing. Over the next several decades, Frost published numerous collections of poems, including New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes (1924) and Collected Poems (1931), winning a total of four Pulitzer Prizes and establishing his reputation as the foremost American poet of his generation.

Book preview

PART I

INTO MY OWN

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,

So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,

Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,

But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

I should not be withheld but that some day

Into their vastness I should steal away,

Fearless of ever finding open land,

Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I do not see why I should e’er turn back,

Or those should not set forth upon my track

To overtake me, who should miss me here

And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew—

Only more sure of all I thought was true.

GHOST HOUSE

I dwell in a lonely house I know

That vanished many a summer ago,

And left no trace but the cellar walls,

And a cellar in which the daylight falls,

And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.

O’er ruined fences the grape-vines shield

The woods come back to the mowing field;

The orchard tree has grown one copse

Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;

The footpath down to the well is

Reviews for A Boy's Will

[dasam-5 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Early Frost---with the weakness of late 19th Century "poetic diction," There are glimmers of what great poetry that is to come. If you are studying his development, this is a good collection to see where Frost began, Otherwise, move to later collections for the good stuff.

[gregorio_roth · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Robert Frost is much more than a yankee deciding on which road to take. I liked this one a lot.