Early Frost (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading): A Boy's Will, North of Boston, and Mountain Interval

By Robert Frost

"He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding." – John F. Kennedy about Robert Frost

America’s beloved poet Robert Frost explores the profound beauty of nature in this collection of his early works.  Although he carefully crafts his poems, they are written with the common man in mind so that all may enjoy, and perhaps be bettered by, his reflection on the world.  Perusing the pages of this book, you will find such timeless favorites as “The Road Not Taken,” “Mending Wall,” “Birches,” and “After Apple-Picking.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411430020

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

INTRODUCTION

EARLY FROST IS A SURPRISE. IN A BOY’S WILL, NORTH OF BOSTON, AND Mountain Interval, we encounter the work of a poet so familiar everyone thinks they know him and so accessible that some have mistaken the ease with which they approach him for lack of depth. But these poems, the first three collections he published, between 1913 and 1916, are fresh and full of surprises almost a century later, surprises enough to disorder orders we think we know. Part of what makes Robert Frost so fresh at the beginning of the twenty-first century is his recognition that even in a complex, urban world it remains essential to be versed (as he himself put it in a later collection) in country things. This does not mean a simple retreat from the complexity of city life, but an encounter with the natural world in which humans work, which, while it may appear sublime, is also hostile or at best indifferent. Being human is complicated whether one lives in the city, in the country or in between; yet wherever one lives, nature provides the context.

Robert Frost’s poetry is rooted in rural New England, with which he is invariably and often exclusively identified. But he was born in San Francisco in 1874 and grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where he settled with his mother and sister after his father died of tuberculosis in 1885. Robert’s father, William Prescott Frost, Jr., was a Harvard graduate, a teacher, a newspaper editor, and a Democratic politician. He named his son after Confederate General Robert E. Lee and is said to have run off as a teenager to join the Confederate army in Virginia before being sent back to New Hampshire. But when he arrived in San Francisco the Democratic newspaper he worked for was owned by Henry George, a fiery post-Civil War critic of wage-slavery; so his politics appear to have been more complex than the pejorative Copperhead (applied to Confederate sympathizers in the North) might imply. He was prone to depression, and he died when he was only thirty-four—both facts of some relevance in understanding Robert’s early sense of his own mortality and the complex psychology evident retrospectively in his life and in his poems. His mother, Isabelle Moodie, was a teacher and a devout Swedenborgian. Robert was baptized in the Swedenborgian church, and this simultaneously devout and, by New England standards, decidedly unorthodox religious background is relevant to the complex theology of his poetry. It gives him a spiritual connection with William Blake, with whom he shared an understanding of imagination as an active force in the real world rather than a passive escape from it, and it contributes to the easygoing engagement of Frost’s mysticism, already evident in the early poems included in this volume. Robert was impatient with formal schooling, so he received much of his education at home—a tradition he continued with his own children, even as he became established as a teacher in New Hampshire. He attended Dartmouth for less than a year and studied for two years at Harvard, where he encountered the ideas of philosophers George Santayana, Josiah Royce, and (though he did not actually study with him) William James. After he left Harvard in 1899, Frost took up poultry farming in New Hampshire, where he farmed full-time near Derry until 1906. Among his earliest prose works are articles on poultry farming published in The Eastern Poultryman and Farm Poultry between 1903 and 1906. From 1906 to 1911, Frost continued to farm part-time while he taught English at Pinkerton Academy, where he became known as a demanding and innovative teacher and developed a pragmatic approach to education in the spirit of William James and John Dewey. He spoke of having a go rather than taking a course and insisted that his students be actively engaged in creative work. He sold the farm in 1911 and moved first to Derry and then to Plymouth, where he taught psychology and education at Plymouth State Normal School before he and his family moved to England in 1912, where they remained until 1915.

Frost published almost no poetry before he went to England, but he quickly established connections there—including, among others, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the philosopher-critic T. E. Hulme—and published two collections, both with David Nutt, before returning to the States. While it was most likely a matter of timing more than of conscious resistance on the part of American publishers that resulted in Frost’s first two collections appearing first in England (though Frost did write in his Notebooks that New York publishers found it hard to take a poet with mud on his shoes seriously), it is interesting that the quintessential American poet of the twentieth century found his public voice as a poet in England.

But, though A Boy’s Will and North of Boston were first published in England, they are indisputably New England books. In correspondence from the time of publication, Frost says that he went to England to write, not to get published. And, by his account, he carried the manuscript of A Boy’s Will to David Nutt almost on a whim. He had assumed the book, which he had written before he left the United States, would be published by an American publisher; and it seems to have come as a surprise that it was so readily accepted in England. The book received strong reviews and was followed a year later by North of Boston, a collection even more closely tied to New England. Positive critical response on both sides of the Atlantic paved the way for the third book included in this volume, Mountain Interval, which was first published in the United States by Henry Holt. These early collections contain some of Frost’s best-known poems (including Mowing, Mending Wall, and The Death of the Hired Man), and they tied him inextricably to New England (and especially New Hampshire) in the public mind. Of the three, North of Boston most clearly exemplifies Frost’s generally narrative approach even to lyric poetry. Frost described A Boy’s Will in a letter to Elizabeth Sergeant as poems of youth, written separately, between 1892 and 1912, not in a design to be together. He went on to say that they represented a sort of clinical curve and that he realized they had a unity, could be a book. North of Boston, on the other hand, is built around fifteen narratives that make it read almost like a collection of short stories in verse, with two short lyrics (The Pasture and Good Hours) added as bookends. Mountain Interval combines some of the most beautiful of Frost’s short lyrics (notably, The Road Not Taken) with story poems (such as Snow) that again confirm his regional rootedness and sensitivity to the sound and rhythm of the language of the place with which he became so closely identified. More than one critic has noted that Frost was so at home in the sound and rhythm of New England at least partly because of his intense involvement in farming at the beginning of the twentieth century. When he traveled to poultry shows or talked with his neighbors, he listened; and, as a result, he settled into the rhythm and tone of the place he occupied for so many years.

The first thing a reader of A Boy’s Will encounters is Frost’s engagement with the sonnet, indicative of both his devotion to form and the freedom with which he moved in it. The first poem in the collection, Into My Own, is a traditional sonnet with a regular rhyme scheme and meter. It is broken into three quatrains with a concluding couplet that may be taken to highlight the mature confidence of a poet who was almost forty when he published this first collection—or the hard-headedness of a Yankee not inclined to change his mind: They would not find me changed from him they knew—/ Only more sure of all I thought was true. This first poem in the first collection Frost published takes a stance vis-a-vis time that he also takes up in what is perhaps his best known poem, The Road Not Taken—looking back from some future present on a life in time, not so much on a past moment as on the process of life that is always passing. The poem also introduces the image of a dark wood to which Frost will often return, as in A Dream Pang, where the I of the poem had withdrawn in forest, and my song / Was swallowed up in leaves that blew away. The unmistakable image of solitude and the dark wood as uncharted territory into which one might venture and be lost is tempered by the final couplet: But ’tis not true that thus I dwelt aloof, / For the wood wakes, and you are here for proof. This is one of many illustrations of the doubleness of Frost’s vision that Frank Lentricchia connects with his use of simile. His poems are rarely either/ors resolved by a single decision. More often, they hold conflicting possibilities together—in this case, the solitude of an I withdrawn and the community of I with an other present at the forest edge.

The most masterful example of the sonnet form in A Boy’s Will—and one of the best examples in the entire body of his work of the depth to which Frost penetrated the ordinary (beyond Wordsworth, as Robert Faggan has suggested)—is Mowing, in which Frost forms the sound and sense of simple human work into a poem. Jay Parini and others have exposed the latent sexuality of the poem (mowing is a traditional euphemism for sex). But, be that as it may, the poem stands or falls on the simple presentation of a simple act of work, and Frost does this spectacularly. The ear of the mind can hear it as clearly as the eye of the mind can see it: 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? I knew not well myself; / Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun, / Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—/ And that was why it whispered and did not speak. The slicing of the scythe is present in the sense of the sound. And the concluding couplet is as vivid a presentation of pragmatism as any in James: The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. / My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make. The fact (pragma) is the made of making. And making applied to hay, as the last word in the poem, is simultaneously active and passive: the mower makes hay, but the hay makes by lying where the scythe leaves it. Frost reflected on this doubleness of making as it relates to form in poetry in 1919: "A man who makes really good literature is like a fellow who goes into the fields to pull carrots. He keeps on pulling them patiently enough until he finds a carrot that suggests something else to him. It is not shaped like other carrots. He takes out his knife and notches it here and there, until the two pronged roots become legs and the carrot takes on something of the semblance of a man. The real genius takes hold of that bit of life which is suggestive to him and gives it form. But the man who is merely