That Frost Saw North of Boston as the keystone of his poetic and economic success is clear in a letter he wrote John Bartlett from Beaconsfield in November 1913, as he was completing his work on the book. There Frost seems most excited by the growing literary friendships he had formed during his first year in England, which by the summer of 1913 had begun to bear fruit. One June discussion of his poetics with Frank Flint had included Robert Bridges, and Frost felt especially encouraged when he placed his own ideas on prosody alongside those of England’s Poet Laureate. But eager as he is “to brag a bit” to Bartlett “about [his] exploits as a poet,” Frost finds he must first discount them against his larger ambitions, which in turn make clear how his poetic aims involve the nation’s mass-market economy. Beginning in teacherly fashion to his former student, Frost explains that

there is a kind of success called “of esteem” and it butters no parsnips. It means a success with the critical few who are supposed to know. But really to arrive where I can stand on my own legs as a poet and nothing else I must get outside that circle to the general reader who buys books in their thousands. I may not be able to do that. I believe in doing it — don’t you doubt me there. I want to be a poet for all sorts and kinds. I could never make a merit of being caviare [sic] to the crowd the way my quasi-friend Pound does. I want to reach out. (SL, 98)

These comments reveal the related yet conflicting commitments in Frost’s idea of his poetic vocation. Wishing to be “a poet for all sorts and kinds,” not for an intellectual elite, Frost slights Pound for slighting the general reader, much as he had slighted Frost himself, and in doing so Frost anticipates the anger he would express decades later about those who condescended to his North of Boston characters. In that 1937 talk, called “Poverty and Poetry,” Frost made explicit these implied connections between himself, the “general reader,” and the human subjects of his poems. “[W]hen I speak of my people,” he says there, “I sort of mean a class, the ordinary folks I belong to.