Bound by Emotion

North of Boston, Robert Frost's second book, was published in 1914. It consisted of 17 poems - dramatic narratives, dialogues, lyrics - which, though they cut across generic lines, shared several important features, the most obvious being, as the title implies, a common New England background.

With hindsight Frost came to recognize that some of his subsequent, post-1914 poems fit much the same pattern, and so in his middle years he conceived the plan of adding some of these later poems to the original 17 to create, as he said, "a new and more inclusive North ofBoston." It was apparently not the most urgent project in the world, for although the poet did get around to beginning a draft of the preface for his projected book, he died leaving both book and preface undone. But whereas poets propose, editors dispose. Now, 63 years after publication of North of Boston, Edward Connery Lathem has fulfilled Frost's wish.

In choosing additional poems for the enlarged North of Boston, Lathem had at hand a few directives, express and implied, which Frost had left behind, and the editor's choices reflect a nice discernment. All 17 poems in the 1914 North ofBoston are here in precisely their original form and order. In addition, Lathem supplies 13 more "eclogues," as Frost called them, chosen from subsequent books published as early as 1916 (Mountain Interval) and as late as 1962 (In theClearing). Thus many of Frost's best known New England poems are brought together: such early works as "Mending Wall," "The Wood-Pile," or "The Death of the Hired Man," along with later but equally familiar poems such as "West-Running Brook," "Two Tramps in Mud Time," and "Directive." For "a few pictures not too illustrative" (the poet's own dictum), Lathem reproduces eight of the magnificent J. J. Lankes woodcuts which had originally illustrated such books as New Hampshire (1923) and West-Running Brook (1928).

The advantage of Frost's conception, to say nothing of Lathem's judicious execution, is clear. If it is true that we experience each poem in relation to every other poem we have ever read, then every poem in this expanded North ofBoston gains in the reading by its proximity to others of a similar order. But the conception is also self-limiting, for by definition an assemblage of, as it were, regional poems must exclude other important - some would say preponderant - aspects of Frost's poetic achievement. Taken alone, the book may therefore tend to reinforce the simplistic view of Frost as the good, gray, cozy - not to say coy - New England regional poet. He was of course a great deal more than such a parochial view would imply. Caveat lector.

But in the main, Frost was surely right in his original conception of a "more inclusive Northof Boston." Whether written early or late, as he recognized, these poems do "seem to have something in common." The most obvious "something" is of course their shared New Englandness; they are all "locative." But they are bound together by more than merely the poet's strong, New England sense of place. They also share a common tone, diction, cadence, mood, and even dramatic stance. Frost's close English friend Edward Thomas came nearest the mark in reviewing the original North ofBoston 63 years ago: "Many, if not most, of the separate lines and separate sentences are plain and, in themselves, nothing. But they are bound together and made elements of beauty by a calm eagerness of emotion."

NORTH OF BOSTON POEMSBy Robert Frost '96Edward Conrterv Lathem '51, ed.Dodd, Mead, 1977. 181 pp. $8.95