This would lead to one of the most condensed and fruitful periods of creativity in American poetry, if not American letters. Major poets generally have two or more strong periods over a span of decades—for instance, thirty-three years passed between the publication of Wallace Stevens’s best-known poem, “The Snow Man,” and the highly regarded poems gathered under the title The Rock in his Collected Poems of 1954. But Frost’s body of work is dominated by his early efforts. “I might say the core of all my writing,” Frost later wrote, “was probably the five free years I had there on the farm down the road from Derry Village.” Indeed, over the next decade, Frost would write many of the poems that would appear in his first three books, including “The Oven Bird,” “Hyla Brook,” “Mowing,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “The Wood-Pile,” and “Putting in the Seed,” and even poems that would appear in much later collections. (“Design” was written in this period but didn’t show up in a book until twenty-five years later.) He also ran the Derry farm, albeit with a debatable degree of competence. Between 1902 and 1905 Frost and Elinor had two more girls—Marjorie and Irma—and a boy, Carol. (A sixth and final child, Elinor Bettina, was born in 1907 but lived only a few days.) When the growing family needed more money, Frost began teaching at Pinkerton Academy, a nearby school, where he acquired a reputation as an innovative if peculiar instructor.

But he was still almost completely unknown as a poet. So in 1912, at age thirty-eight, Frost decided on another major move—but this time, one that would be devoted entirely to the completion of a book of poems and the advancement of his literary career. He and Elinor flipped a coin between Canada and England, and England won. The couple’s attitude toward this departure—an undertaking for which they had barely enough money, even with the sale of the farm—was surprisingly optimistic; their daughter Lesley later suggested to a friend that Frost and Elinor had wanted “a dramatic change of scene together,” which is perhaps understandable, given the course their lives had followed to that point. In the fall of 1912, they set sail for Glasgow with their children and then made their way to London by train. They settled in Beaconsfield in a cottage called the Bungalow.

This proved to be the great turning point of Frost’s life—the great road taken, you might say—for he almost immediately managed to place his first book, A Boy’s Will, with an English publisher. And just in time. Frost and Elinor had been married for seventeen years, had moved countless times, had buried two children while raising another four, and had yet to make a stable living at farming or teaching. Frost was far from the young man who had walked into a swamp in a fit of desperation; his difficulties now had the weightier, less romantic character that comes with middle age and its subtle diminishments. “We poets in our youth begin in gladness,” Wordsworth said. “But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.” Frost’s career doesn’t quite turn this formula on its head, but his first successes came much further from the “gladness” of youth than the title A Boy’s Will might lead readers to suppose. “We couldn’t comprehend . . . ,” wrote Lesley, “what resolve, what hope, what patience in waiting, had gone into that first book.”