Member-only story
My Frost is dramatic — to me, Frost is stronger writing dramatic poems than lyrics. North of Boston is, by far, the better book than A Boy’s Will. I have made the distinction and I will make it again: Robert Frost’s dramatic poems are more American. Overwhelmingly, they have a setting: they take somewhere in New England — whether it’s a farm, a home, or a field. That may be a big reason why “A Hundred Collars” is not as popular as “The Road Not Taken” — because “A Hundred Collars” is in Lancaster, New Hampshire. The road that diverges in two? That could be anywhere — and thus “The Road Not Taken” could be the Russian poem, English poem, Japanese poem, or whatever — it has a universality that most of North of Boston just doesn’t. The British poems of A Boy’s Will have too many caesuras and flowery that stop the flow of reading, while the American poems of North of Boston show Frost’s “American ear” that prizes sentence sounds and the limitation of caesuras, as Walcott emphasized.
Look to any dramatic poem in North of Boston to see the greatness of Frost’s dramatic poetry — the first of which is “Death of a Hired Man.” The poem starts off with a the first conversation we see in a Frost poem to date, one between Mary and Warren about the arrival of an old hired man, Sila. “She ran on tiptoe down the darkened…
