Robert Frost's Derry Farm: Where the Poems Were Born

Just south of here, on a modest farm in Derry, Robert Frost spent eleven years doing something that looks, from the outside, like failing at almost everything.

Frost arrived in nineteen hundred. His grandfather had bought the place and handed it over on one condition: Robert had to work it. The hope was that farming would steady a young man who had already dropped out of Dartmouth, tried teaching, and suffered through the death of his first child. Frost milked cows, raised chickens, and mostly wrote.

He was not a natural farmer. He slept late, walked the fields at odd hours, and filled notebooks instead of ledgers. But the land did something to his language. The stone walls dividing pastures, the apple orchards going leggy in autumn, the brook running across the back lot, the neighbors who spoke in a clipped Yankee cadence that said one thing and meant another, and all of it soaked in.

During those Derry years, Frost wrote most of the poems that would go into his first book, "A Boy's Will," and the bulk of what became "North of Boston." These were not the work of a famous poet. These were the notes of a nobody, unknown in America, who finally shipped the manuscripts to England in nineteen twelve because no American publisher would touch them. Within two years, both books were out, both were praised, and Frost came home a made man.

He would later say the Derry years were the most important of his life. Of the experience at Derry he said, "There was something about the experience at Derry which stayed in my mind, and was tapped for poetry." The pastures and seasons here gave him his method: ordinary people, ordinary speech, ordinary landscapes, carrying weights that almost break them.

The farmhouse still stands as a New Hampshire State Historic Site. The path Frost walked at midnight is still there. The stone walls he could not stop writing about have outlasted everything else.