By the time of the publication of Robert Frost's New Hampshire (1923), Frost (1874–1963) was no stranger to narrative poetry. In fact, narrativity had been central to Frost's practice at least since the writing of North of Boston, a book that broke with his previous tendency to write short rhyming lyric poems. Throughout his career, Frost was drawn to longer narrative forms.
This may be one of the reasons why Frost is considered so classic in the American canon, perhaps more akin in spirit to British Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) than, say, Marianne Moore (1887–1972); his work was contemporaneous with the modernists, who mostly eschewed any sort of typical narrative form and were more inclined to partake in free verse, which Frost once likened to "playing tennis without a net." Though narrativity made Frost's poems stand apart from those of the Modernists, his use of the form was so unique that it in fact marks him as one of them. His narrative poems center dialogue and disengage from rhyme. Frost innovated on this form, called the dramatic narrative, in both his language and his choices of voices to take on; while he has precedents in poets from Virgil (70 BC–19 BC) to Robert Browning (1812–1889) to Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), his work was unique in its use of plain, concise language and direct dialogue.
While some of Frost's contemporaries and friends, such as Ezra Pound, not to mention many readers since, saw Frost's traditional forms and use of rhyme as markers of simplicity and even backwardness in his poetry, his subtle and incisive irony and his stark, specific descriptions drew his work away from the traditionalists that the modernists had broken with. While his poems often look and sound deceptively traditional, his use of and innovation on more antiquated poetic devices set Frost apart from both older poets and his contemporaries; this is a large part of the reason he remains so prominent in the American canon.
