North of Boston
Frost's breakthrough collection, the book that made him famous on both sides of the Atlantic, written in blank verse dramatic monologues that capture rural New England speech with a subtlety no one had achieved before. "Mending Wall" and "The Death of the Hired Man" look like simple pastoral poetry and contain everything: property, community, obligation, grief. Beneath Frost's accessible surface runs a cold darkness that his reputation for optimism long obscured.
With only seventeen poems, several running multiple pages, North of Boston reads to some as short stories chopped into lines rather than verse: one reviewer flatly calls them “bad short stories disguised as poems,” and another says the “second part consists of short stories rather than poems.” A number of readers prefer Frost's first book outright, writing “I preferred A Boy's Will over North of Boston,” and at least one gave up entirely: “This was painful!! It was so bad!! I couldn't get through it.” The collection splits roughly in half by mood, what one reader sums up as “roughly half pastoral, nature-y stuff and half New England slice of life,” and readers less familiar with narrative verse find the long conversational pieces less rewarding than Frost's shorter, quotable lyrics.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
