A Boy's Will

Robert Frost was thirty-nine, a failed farmer and sometime schoolteacher from New Hampshire, when A Boy's Will appeared in London in April 1913. He had sailed to England with his wife Elinor and their four children the previous year, settling in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, with no publisher and no literary reputation on either side of the Atlantic. The manuscript was accepted by the firm of David Nutt, then run by Mrs. Alfred Nutt after her husband's death in 1910; it was reportedly the first publisher Frost approached. About a thousand copies were printed, of which roughly 350 were initially bound and issued. Ezra Pound, reviewing the book in Poetry that May, became the first American to praise Frost's work in print, though Frost took the notice uneasily and by October was writing to a friend that Pound was "an incredible ass." The first American edition did not follow until 1915, from Henry Holt and Company, the house that would remain Frost's publisher for the rest of his life.

The title borrows from Longfellow's "My Lost Youth" — "A boy's will is the wind's will" — and the thirty-two poems inside are arranged not in the order Frost wrote them but as a narrative arc, tracing a young man's movement from solitude toward fellowship with the world. Frost underscored this design by adding prose glosses to all but two of the poems in the table of contents: brief, third-person notes that read almost like stage directions. "Into My Own," the opening poem, marks the turn inward; "The Tuft of Flowers," placed early in the sequence, marks the return. The lyrics are predominantly short, metered, and rhymed — conventional in form but already marked by the colloquial plainness that would become Frost's signature. Many draw on the landscape and labor of the Derry farm where Frost had spent nine years writing in the early mornings before chores, so that England published what New England had grown.

"Mowing," a sonnet Frost later named as his favorite poem in the book, is the clearest early instance of what he called the "sound of sense" — the whispered exchange between scythe and field becoming a quiet argument that the fact of honest labor is "the sweetest dream that labor knows." "Storm Fear" places a small household against a winter gale and lets doubt accumulate line by line until the speaker confesses he is unsure his family can "save ourselves unaided." "My November Guest" personifies sorrow as a companion who finds beauty in bare November fields the speaker cannot yet see. "Reluctance," closing the book, refuses to accept seasonal or emotional endings and arrives at its famous final question: when was it ever less than treason "to go with the drift of things"? The collection did not sell widely in 1913, and Mrs. Nutt's contract later proved so restrictive as to be described as disastrous. But A Boy's Will established Frost's voice — plain, metered, rooted in observed fact — and when North of Boston followed a year later, readers recognized they were hearing the same poet, only more fully arrived.