Robert Frost Waited 20 Years for His First Book
Quick answer: Robert Frost published his first poem at 20 and his first book at 39, after two decades of rejection and a desperate move to England. The full story.
Picture a poultry farmer in Derry, New Hampshire, around 1905, sitting up at the kitchen table after the family is asleep, writing poems that American magazines keep sending back. He is in his early thirties. His first published poem appeared in a New York weekly back in 1894, when he was twenty, and earned him fifteen dollars; in the decade since, almost nothing. He has left two colleges without a degree, buried his first child, and lives on a farm his grandfather bought him, farming badly by his own cheerful admission. His name is Robert Frost, and no one in American poetry has any idea he exists.
The gap between that first poem and his first book, A Boy's Will, runs very nearly twenty years. When the book finally appeared in April 1913, it was published not in Boston or New York but in London, by a small English firm, because at thirty-eight Frost had sold the farm, taken his wife and four children across the Atlantic, and bet everything on the one market that had never rejected him, on the grounds that it had never heard of him. It remains the most instructive gamble in modern poetry.
Twenty years of almost
Frost's apprenticeship was long even by the standards of a slow art. My Butterfly: An Elegy, taken by the New York Independent in 1894, was a real, professional acceptance, and it turned out to be a false dawn. He had two copies of a tiny pamphlet called Twilight privately printed that year, one for himself and one for Elinor White, whom he was courting; the story that he destroyed his own copy in despair after a cold reception is widely told, though details vary with the teller. He tried Dartmouth and later Harvard, finishing at neither, and worked as a teacher, a mill hand and a newspaperman.
In 1900 his grandfather bought the family a farm in Derry, New Hampshire. The Derry years look, from outside, like failure comfortably prolonged: eggs, apples, a growing family, and a drawer of poems that editors kept declining. From inside they were the making of him. The sound of New England speech, the stone walls, the mowing, the hired men, all of it was being banked. He later taught at Pinkerton Academy, where he was reportedly a brilliant, unorthodox teacher. But by 1911 he was nearing forty, and the ledger read: one farm he did not want, twenty years of writing, no book.
The gamble
In 1911 Frost sold the Derry farm, and in the autumn of 1912 he sailed for England with Elinor and the four children, settling in a cottage in Beaconsfield, outside London. The move was not romantic; it was arithmetic. England was cheap to live in, London was the centre of the poetry world, and a total unknown lost nothing by starting where nobody knew he had been rejected. He was carrying two decades of finished poems.
Within months he walked the manuscript of A Boy's Will into the small London firm of David Nutt, and the firm took it. The book appeared in April 1913, a few weeks after Frost turned thirty-nine. Most of its poems had been written years earlier on the farm; nothing about them had changed except, at last, their address.
England makes an American poet
London gave Frost what New Hampshire could not: a room of qualified listeners. Ezra Pound, then busy discovering people, reviewed A Boy's Will and introduced Frost around. More important was the friendship Frost formed with the English writer Edward Thomas, whose reviews of Frost's second book were among the most perceptive it received, and whom Frost in turn famously encouraged from prose into poetry.
That second book was North of Boston, published in London in 1914, and it is one of the great second acts in literary history: Mending Wall, The Death of the Hired Man, Home Burial, blank-verse poems in the speech of the farms he had just abandoned. When the war drove the Frosts home in February 1915, the American publisher Henry Holt had already brought out North of Boston in New York. Frost stepped off the boat to discover he had become, in absentia, the new American poet. Magazines that had declined him for years now wrote asking for poems; a widely told anecdote has one famous monthly, which had once assured him it had no room for his vigorous verse, receiving exactly that verse back with interest.
The turn, honestly weighed
What changed in 1913? Not the poems. Many of the pieces in A Boy's Will were a decade old, and the manuscripts North of Boston grew from were Derry work through and through. What changed was the room. American magazine editors of 1905 were not villains; they were buying a different kind of poem, ornate and genteel, and Frost's plain speech fell outside their category. London in 1913, mid-ferment, had editors and poets actively hunting for exactly the new thing Frost had been quietly making. He did not become good in England. He became audible.
Frost's own share of the turn was brutally simple: he had kept the poems, kept writing more, and been willing at thirty-eight, with four children, to move to the one market that might hear him. Persistence gets sentimentalised; his version involved selling a farm. Luck then did its part, in the shape of Pound's energy and Thomas's friendship, and it found a man holding twenty years of finished work.
What a working writer can take from this
First, being unpublished is not the same as being unready. Frost at thirty was already writing poems that would live for a century; the market's silence measured the market, not the poems. The practical move, when your work keeps missing, is Frost's move: change the room, not the voice. Submit to different magazines, different countries, different contests, any venue whose taste might match what you actually do, before you sand your style down to fit venues that never will. Writory's contest scores every entry on language, emotion, structure, creativity and theme, which is one way to find out whether your voice or merely your current audience is the problem.
Second, bank the unfashionable years. Everything that made Frost unmistakable, the stone walls, the pasture speech, the country darkness under the plain surface, was accumulated during the exact period that looked like failure. He went on to win the Pulitzer Prize four times and to read at a presidential inauguration at eighty-six, and every line of that career was drawn on the Derry account. If you are in your own Derry years, the ledger is not empty. It is filling where the market cannot see it. And read North of Boston with a pencil: Mowing alone, with its closing claim that the fact is the sweetest dream that labour knows, is a whole poetics in fourteen lines.
What poets can take from this
- If your work keeps missing, change the room before you change the voice; Frost crossed an ocean rather than write genteel verse.
- Keep everything; A Boy's Will was assembled from a decade of poems the market had already refused.
- Use your invisible years to bank material; the Derry farm looked like failure and funded fifty years of poetry.
- Court honest peers, not just editors; Edward Thomas's understanding mattered as much as any acceptance.
- Do not treat age as a deadline; Frost was 39 at his first book and 86 at the inauguration lectern.
- Submit widely and internationally; the editor who finally says yes may simply live in a different country.
Try it yourself
Write a poem about a skill practised for twenty years in private, set entirely in the final hour before it is first shown to a stranger.
Questions
How old was Robert Frost when his first book was published?
He was thirty-nine. A Boy's Will was published in London by David Nutt in April 1913, a few weeks after his birthday, nearly twenty years after his first professionally published poem, My Butterfly, appeared in the New York Independent in 1894.
Why did Robert Frost move to England?
By 1911 he had spent nearly two decades being declined by American magazines. He sold the Derry farm and moved his family to England in 1912 because living there was affordable and London was the centre of the poetry world. Both of his first two books were published in London before any American edition existed.
How many Pulitzer Prizes did Frost win?
Four, more than any other poet: for New Hampshire in 1924, Collected Poems in 1931, A Further Range in 1937 and A Witness Tree in 1943. In 1961, aged eighty-six, he also recited a poem at President Kennedy's inauguration.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.