NORTH OF BOSTON Inscribed to Sidney Cox

London: David Nutt, (1914). First Edition. cloth. Near Fine, lacking the scarce dustwrapper. Crane A3: Binding A, one of 350 copies in this first binding of a total of 1000 printed of Frost's second book. INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the poet at a very early date on the front endpaper "Sidney Cox/from/Robert Frost/Ryton Dymock/England/October 1914." The lifelong friendship between Frost and Cox began while Frost was teaching at the New Hampshire State Normal School in the academic year 1911 - 1912, before the publication of Frost's first book. Cox described their friendship in his own book, A SWINGER OF BIRCHES: A PORTRAIT OF ROBERT FROST. Frost's several months living in the old parish of Dymock was shared in part with the poet Edward Thomas whom Frost considered the closest friend he ever had. Thomas compared Frost to Wordsworth in one of his several favorable reviews of NORTH OF BOSTON. England's entry into the First World War hastened Frost's return to America early in 1915 with Thomas volunteering for service later that year and in 1917 giving his life in battle. According to THE OXFORD COMPANION TO TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETRY IN ENGLISH, Frost told Cox in 1914, the very year of this inscription, that the true poet's pleasure lay in making "his own words as he goes" rather than depending upon words whose meanings were fixed: "We write of things we see and we write in accents we hear. Thus we gather both our material and our technique with the imagination from life; and our technique becomes as much material as material itself." An important copy of this early and essential collection by Frost.