North of Boston

About this book

Robert Frost's second book is a collection of dramatic poems and dialogues set among the farms of rural New England: two neighbours mending a stone wall in spring, one insisting that 'good fences make good neighbors'; a farmer and his wife talking over the return of an old hired man who has come home to die; a mother who cannot forgive her husband for the calm with which he dug their child's grave; and an apple-picker who, at the end of the harvest, feels sleep coming on.

Context and significance

Frost (1874–1963) published the book in London in 1914, while he and his family were living in England, and its plain speech and dramatic power made him famous on both sides of the Atlantic. He later won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times. Then turn to his first book, A Boy's Will.

About the author