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Atlantic Unbound | January 31, 2006
Robert Frost in The Atlantic Monthly
The First Three Poems and One That Got Away
An Atlantic editor snubs a poet and lives to regret it
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 ometime in 1912, before Robert Frost made his famous leap to "live under thatch" in England, where he would become known as a poet, he sent some of his poems to Ellery Sedgwick, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and in due course received a personal reply that read, "We are sorry that we have no place in The Atlantic Monthly for your vigorous verse." Frost's submission included some of his finest early poems — "Reluctance," for example.
Sedgwick's ambiguous snub rankled in Frost's memory. During the
two and a half years he lived in England his first two books of poetry,
A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), were
published there, though not yet in the United States. Thanks partly to
Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine,
Frost's poems were hailed in advance of U.S. publication as representing a
new American voice. In February, 1915, North of Boston was
published in New York, just as the Frost family set foot back in the
United States.
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