Customer Reviews

Poems by Robert Frost: A Boy's Will and North of Boston (Signet Classics)

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Many budget-priced classics are poorly edited, with a forward or introduction that is little more than a token gesture. This edition of Frost's early work, comprising his first two publications, is a notable exception. The introduction by William Pritchard and the afterword by Peter Davison are both first-rate. The poems themselves are very fine and if you read them in sequence they give a real sense of the poet's development. It is also nice that they are in their original forms, including the glosses that Frost later removed.

With such fine editing, and at such a low price, this book is well worth having.

The book is a collection of poems by Robert Frost. It combines the collections of A Boys Will, and North of Boston. Many of the poems were about nature, and love. I selected the book because I had read Robert Frost before and I liked his style, and I felt I could relate to some of the poems. Most of them had no riming scheme, and were written in sentences, or stanzas. There was one poem about Blueberries that I particularly enjoyed because I like picking them. I also liked it because some of the poems seemed to have a hidden meaning. I thought that Frost wrote discriptive ad imaginable language. I would recommend it to readers that are older than 13. I would also recommend it to readers who like reading about nature. And finally I would recommend it to anyone who has read Robert frost, and enjoyed his work.

Robert Frost came into public view with "A Boy's Will" and "North of Boston," his first short collections of poetry. While Frost's "voice" is a bit unformed in these poems, the rich ponderings of nature and love are never stronger, full of "sun-saturated meadows," melancholy looks at life and death, and pearly streams.

"I should not be withheld but that some day/Into their vastness I should steal away," Frost announces in the first poem of "A Boy's Will." He follows up this statement with everything from eerie story-poems ("Love and a Question") to exultant ("A Prayer in Spring") to melancholy meditations on nature's beauty, love, and broken hearts.

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall," is the first line of one of Frost's more typical poems in "North of Boston," a nuanced work about neighbors rebuilding a wall between them. But then there are poems like "Death of the Hired Man," a long conversation between a man and his wife, about a former worker who has returned home to die. Another is just about a mountain, as told by a farmhand.

Poets take awhile to reach their peak, and Frost was still starting out in these books. That said, it's astounding how good he was even in his first volume of poetry (though at times the rhymes are a little too simple, and the subjects don't vary much). Most striking is Frost's passion -- his enthusiasm, sorrow and thoughts seem to spill off the page.

"A Boy's Will" and "North of Boston" are pretty different, though. The first collection is far less grounded, more ethereal and almost dreamy. Both possess Frost's exquisite phrasing ("A bead of silver water more or less/Strung on your hair won't hurt your summer looks") but the second focuses on more mundane things like hotels, farms and strangers. And more of the poems are long conversations, instead of meditations on nature and life. The first, however, has a poem about a moonlit search for a brook, the God Pan, and the stirring historical poem "In Equal Sacrifice," about Douglas carrying Robert the Bruce's heart to the Holy Land

On an emotional level, the poems are about equal -- "A Boy's Will" is beautifully written, while "North of Boston" is powerful. Some readers might not be thrilled about the conversational poems, which are mostly composed of two people talking in a rather grounded fashion. ("Stark?" he inquired. "No matter for the proof."/"Yes, Stark. And you?"/"I'm Stark." He drew his passport.) But it is quite intriguing to see Frost expanding his poetry and seeing what else he was capable of doing.

"A Boy's Will and North of Boston" encompasses the first two volumes of Robert Frost's classic poetry, and give a look at a poet expanding his talents and finding his unique voice.

The first half, "A Boy's Will," was better than the second, "North of Boston." ABW are romantic poems, about nature, love, and death, in the grand tradition of Wordsworth et al. They ostensibly follow the couse of a boy's life/coming of age.

The second half, or second book, I didn't like much. Most of the poems are hardly poems at all; they're more like short stories written with line breaks. Some of the stories/poems were interesting, some I just couldn't care about. There were a few more "poemy" poems, like Mending Wall and After Apple Picking, but they're the same poems you find in anthologies, so nothing much gained here.

I would guess that Frost published better books than these later in his career.