A Dramatic Arrival

Published In England in 1914, North of Boston brought Robert Frost to national prominence overnight, astonishing almost everyone but the poet himself, who six months earlier had declared himself ready “to do something to the present state of literature in America” (SL, 88). His first book, A Boy’s Will, had come out the year before to unexceptional reviews and Frost, approaching forty, with a family to support and funds for his stay in England running low, understood that a literary career depended on what he did next. By April 1913, when A Boy’s Will appeared, Frost had a good idea of what his next book would be.

The seeds for it lay in “the bottom of [the] trunk” that Frost brought with him to England when he arrived with his wife Elinor and their four children in September of 1912. Soon after going to contract for A Boy’s Will in October, he embarked on an intense period of composition, starting new poems while completing others begun in New England, and by spring had assembled much of his new book. Though unsettled by reviews of A Boy’s Will as they appeared that summer, too many of which stressed the book’s simplicity, Frost was encouraged by the response of English friends to his new poems and, by July 1913, described the new book as “well in hand” (SL, 83). He continued to shape it into the fall, adding its three major lyrics — “Mending Wall,” “After Apple-Picking,” and “The Wood-Pile” — in September or October. He made no mention of his North of Boston title before November of that year and, taking pains with the volume’s overall design, did not deliver the completed manuscript to his London publisher, David Nutt, until February 1914.

North of Boston was issued in May 1914 and, to Frost’s gratification and relief, was well-reviewed in England through that summer. By fall it had gained the attention of Henry Holt in New York, who in February 1915 reissued it just as the poet returned home, making it Frost’s first American book. Delighted to be in the hands of such a “fine old firm” (Mertins, 141) Frost was even more pleased to find a review, timed to coincide with the book’s release, written for the New Republic by Amy Lowell, doyenne of American verse.