In this collection, published in 1928, Frost once again blends depictions of progress and technology with those of nature and simplicity. His personal life was relatively calm in the five years following the publication of New Hampshire, with highlights being the marriage of daughter Irma and the births of two grandsons—one each to son Carol and Irma and their respective spouses. His youngest child Marjorie continued to struggle with poor health despite a family trip to Europe in early 1928 which had been planned as a tonic. Frost's professional stock rose considerably after winning the Pulitzer Prize for the collection New Hampshire, enabling him to bargain for increasingly lucrative teaching contracts, shuttling between Amherst College and the University of Michigan in response to his own desires and his family's needs.

The mid-1920s brought significant scientific and technological developments that we see reflected in Frost's poetry: the British- American astronomer Cecilia Payne working at Harvard University published important discoveries about the chemical composition of stars in 1925, an idea that emerges later in the poem “Choose Something Like a Star.” Robert Goddard's launch of a liquid-fueled rocket in 1926 was an important first step toward space travel, an idea that intrigued Frost and appeared more prominently in later work. In this collection Frost uses the poem “Riders” to point out that humans are already space travelers, as he presents an image of a baby riding the earth bareback as it hurtles through space.

The development of quantum mechanics by scientists including Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, and Paul Dirac during this time period changed our understanding of the structure of the nucleus and atom. One of the foundations of quantum mechanics is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which places fundamental limits on how accurately it is possible to determine location and velocity. Impressively, language based on the uncertainty principle emerges almost immediately in Frost's poem “A Passing Glimpse,” in which the narrator struggles to identify flowers seen through the window of a moving train. Frost later had the opportunity to meet Heisenberg when the German physicist visited Amherst College.

While the effects of quantum mechanics are most relevant at the atomic scale, discoveries in astronomy occurring at the same time were revealing that our universe was not only much bigger than we thought, but that it was getting bigger all the time.