A Boy's Will

by Pericles Lewis

Robert Frost published his first book of poetry, A Boy’s Will, in London in 1913. Frost was one of many poets whose cause was taken up by Ezra Pound. Pound approved of Frost’s use of the diction of everyday speech, and introduced him to Yeats, whom Frost greatly admired. The setting of Frost’s poems, in rural New England, the apparent unobtrusiveness of his irony, and his attachment to traditional forms militated against his inclusion in any of Pound’s movements, however. “I’d as soon write free verse,” Frost once said, “as play tennis with the net down.” Frost valued his independence and rebuffed Pound’s advances. When war came, he returned to America.[1]


  1. This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis's Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), p. 119. See also Jay Parini, Robert Frost: A Life (London: Heinemann, 1999), pp. 125-131.