Frost's "North of Boston": A Poetic Interpretation of America at the Onset of Modernity (2011)

Undergraduate: Scott Freedenberg

Faculty Advisor: Eliza Richards
Department: English

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Robert Frost's Second collection of poems, "North of Boston," has typically been viewed through its demonstration of Frost’s poetic theory, the “sound of sense.” For Frost, having such a theory would help distinguish him from his literary peers.
However, stopping at the sound of sense ignores much of the literary value of the collection. The initial goal of my SURF research was indeed to describe how the sound of sense contributes to Frost’s representation of America in the book. However, I found that focusing on the sound of sense ignores what I came to see as the true brilliance of "North of Boston": the language of the characters acts as a mediating force that illustrates a greater conflict in communication between them. They find that their traditional ways of living are failing because the alienating force of modernity encroaches increasingly on their communities. With its threat, the characters find themselves unable to look back on the traditional roles that sustained their ancestors, or to look forward because modernity spells a soulless, problematic future. Meanwhile, Frost subtly crafts a metaphor in “Mending Wall,” the collection’s first poem, when a force described as "Something" seeks to create space where they might effectively talk about the problem. The hopeful metaphor that “two can pass abreast” through the gaps provided to them by the “Something” carries through North of Boston, allowing a sustained meditation on modernity's disruption of tradition.