Robert Frost's Derry Farm

Robert Frost moved to a poultry farm in Derry, New Hampshire, in the fall of nineteen hundred. He was twenty-six years old, had published almost nothing, and had just failed to make a living as a teacher. His grandfather, who had little confidence in his grandson's literary ambitions but more than enough money to do something about them, bought him the farm on the condition that he try farming for ten years. Frost tried. He was a poor farmer. The chickens mostly died.

What he had was time, and the farm gave him the material he needed. The stonewalls dividing the fields, the apple orchard in decline, the hired man who came and went, the neighbors whose speech carried the particular flatness of New Hampshire winter conversation, the long January silences broken only by the sound of the woods settling in the cold. He wrote everything down. He published almost none of it. In eleven years at the farm he accumulated the body of work that would become his first two books, A Boy's Will and North of Boston, but he could not find an American publisher willing to take them.

In nineteen twelve, at age thirty-eight, Frost sold the farm and took his family to England. He gave the manuscripts to an English publisher. The books came out in nineteen thirteen and nineteen fourteen to strong critical notice. By the time he returned to the United States in nineteen fifteen, he was famous on both sides of the Atlantic.

The farm in Derry is preserved as a New Hampshire state historic site. The stonewalls he walked are still there. The poem about the stonewalls, 'Mending Wall,' was written here. The poem about the orchard, 'After Apple-Picking,' was written here. The language he developed in eleven years of obscurity in New Hampshire is the language that won four Pulitzer Prizes.