A Further Range
by Robert Frost
Summary
A Further Range, published in 1936, extends Robert Frost's familiar pastoral idiom into more openly argumentative territory than his earlier collections, taking up politics, industrialization and the strains of the Depression alongside his usual rural New England material. Frost organizes the book's poems into six named sections, Taken Doubly, Taken Singly, Ten Mills, The Outlands, Build Soil and Afterthought, a structure that itself signals a more deliberately arranged, thematically self conscious book than his earlier, looser collections. Poems such as A Lone Striker, Build Soil and A Roadside Stand take on organized labor, New Deal agricultural policy and rural economic decline directly, carrying a sharper, sometimes wry public voice that marks a genuine shift from the more purely observational or meditative Frost of his earlier books.
Frost's familiar formal habits, blank verse, dramatic dialogue, rhymed lyric, all still carry the collection, but they now serve poems willing to take a public position rather than stay within pastoral observation, a change Frost himself acknowledged, noting that the book had more of the times in it than anything he had written before and that one publication had called him a counter revolutionary for writing it. Alongside the more topical poems sit some of his most enduring shorter lyrics, including Desert Places, Design and Neither Out Far nor in Deep, poems that return to Frost's more familiar mode of using a small natural scene to open onto a much larger and more unsettling metaphysical question.
Reading A Further Range means watching Frost move between his established pastoral voice and a newer, more overtly public one within the same book, and it suits a reader already familiar with his earlier collections who wants to see how his rural material could accommodate genuine political and social commentary without losing its characteristic restraint.
Historical Context & Significance
Robert Frost won his third Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1937 for A Further Range, six years after his second, for Collected Poems in 1931, and six years before his fourth, for A Witness Tree in 1943, extending the record of four poetry Pulitzers no other poet has matched.
The collection's more openly political poems divided critical opinion at the time, with some readers and reviewers uncomfortable with Frost's shift from rural observer toward a more explicitly public commentator on Depression era politics and labor. The Pulitzer board, however, remained loyal to Frost's established reputation for technical craftsmanship regardless of the newer, more argumentative content, awarding the prize despite the mixed critical reception the book's political turn received on publication.