This Story Of A Vanishing New England farming culture Frost knew personally and well, and it affected him deeply. In 1899, at twenty-five, he had taken his family to the farm in Derry, New Hampshire, that his paternal grandfather, William Prescott Frost, had purchased for his use. There Frost, more through his temperament and values than his work raising chickens, soon developed strong ties with various neighbors trying to maintain traditional ways of life in a rapidly changing economy. Many of these New Hampshire people in and beyond Derry appear in North of Boston, where even Frost’s unsentimental view of character and motive cannot obscure his sympathy and respect. Indeed, by dedicating the volume “to E. M. F.,” his wife Elinor, Frost assigns these portraits and the people behind them to a deeply personal place in his life.

Nonetheless, the Frost who loved the people and language of Derry in all of their natural and cultural rhythms had come to it not as a farmer but as an aspiring poet, and the poet had needs that led him back to the same world of commerce that was pushing this culture toward extinction. In the year leading to the book’s publication, Frost more than once made clear that this expression of personal values and this assertion of poetic prowess were also a bid for economic success. As a labor of ambition as well as love, North of Boston registers indirectly but unmistakably the tension between the poet moved to celebrate a fading culture and the poet determined to find his place in the modern economy that was pushing rural Derry toward the past.

Getting to Derry

For Frost, however, the rural farming life involved complicated feelings, especially at the start, and was chosen partly by default. During his high-school summers, he had done enough farm work to know its drudgery as well as some of its “rituals and mysteries,” including the proper handling of a scythe and the old-fashioned, hands-on ways to make and store hay (Thompson, Early Years, 86–87). These experiences also affirmed his love of the out-of-doors.