A Boy's Will

by Robert Frost

Overview

A Boy’s Will (1913) is a collection of poems by American poet Robert Frost. Published in London and dedicated to the poet’s wife, Elinor, A Boy’s Will, which received enthusiastic early reviews from both Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats, launched Frost’s career as America’s leading poet of the early-twentieth century. Invoking such figures as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson, and Thomas Hardy, Frost ties himself to tradition while establishing his own poetic legacy, grounded in an intuitive sense of rural New England life and the subtleties of the soul.

“Into My Own,” the collection’s opening poem, reveals the poet’s strange wish to “steal away” into “those dark trees, / So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze.” Without fear, he welcomes uncertainty, ventures into it willingly, knowing it is the only way to live. In “Ghost House,” the poet enters a realm of shades and spirits, an underworld of memory where “a lonely house” has left “no trace but the cellar walls.” As he moves through this twilight landscape, encountering the “mute folk…Who share the unlit place” with him, the poet meditates on life and death, their proximity and distance, and his own sense of self within both. “Mowing” envisions the poet’s work through the prism of rural labor. “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?” The speaker does not know, but continues his task, hypnotized by its rhythm and music.

This edition of Robert Frost’s A Boy’s Will is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781605123431
Publisher:	Akasha Classics
Publication date:	01/12/2009
Pages:	108
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.38(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Part I

Into My Own 9

Ghost House 10

My November Guest 12

Love and a Question 13

A Late Walk 15

Stars 16

Storm Fear 17

Wind and Window Flower 18

To the Thawing Wind 20

A Prayer in Spring 21

Flower-Gathering 22

Rose Pogonias 23

Asking for Roses 24

Waiting—afield at Dusk 26

In a Vale 27

A Dream Pang 28

In Neglect 29

The Vantage Point 30

Mowing 31

Going for Water 32

Part II

Revelation 35

The Trial by Existence 36

In Equal Sacrifice 39

The Tuft of Flowers 41

Spoils of the Dead 43

Pan with Us 45

The Demiurge’s Laugh 47

Part III

Now Close the Windows 51

A Line-Storm Song 52

October 54

My Butterfly 55

Reluctance 57