81. North of Boston
There hasn’t been any activity on this thread for a few days, and it looks like it’s finally winding down after quite a run! Since we’re still about 20 short of Tony’s stated goal of 100 books, I’ll use another of my allotted picks, though I hadn’t planned to.
It seems to me that two books not yet listed, though they’ve both been alluded to in the thread, cast a longer shadow over 20th-century poetry in English than any others—North of Boston and The Wasteland. (The Wasteland, though just a single poem, was brought out as a stand-alone book after its initial magazine publication.) So much of what has been written afterwards has been an attempt to emulate, or a violent reaction against, one or the other of these two disparate masterpieces that it seems impossible to ignore them. And while my own favorite individual books of Frost and Eliot are probably New Hampshire and Four Quartets, these two still amaze me as well. (I'll pick the Frost here, and leave Eliot to someone else.)
North of Boston contains the best blank verse from the first 40 years of Frost’s life. Most of his best lyric verse to that point (other than a couple that he included in North of Boston) appeared separately a year earlier in his first published book, the more uneven A Boy’s Will. Some of the best poems from North of Boston have been included in the anthologies for decades, such as “Mending Wall,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Home Burial,” and “After Apple Picking.” But the book also has various other poems that are well worth a second look, including “The Black Cottage” (one of my personal Frost favorites), “A Servant to Servants,” “The Wood Pile,” and the lovely “Good Hours,” which concludes the book.
I don’t have any qualms about North of Boston being the third Frost title on this list. (Others have already suggested Mountain Interval and New Hampshire, both excellent choices.) In fact, if I could pick only one book of 20th Century poetry that has more poems I’ve enjoyed and come back to over and over again, it would be one version or another of Frost’s complete or collected poems, since even Frost’s last volumes, though more uneven, all have poems I wouldn’t want to do without. But I gather the spirit of this list is to favor single volumes that hang best together as a book. North of Boston does that and, along with its companion volume A Boy’s Will, may have been more influential than any others.
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