[Rarebooks] FS: Robert Frost's second book inscribed to a lifelong friend

[Charles Agvent]

FROST,  Robert. NORTH OF BOSTON Inscribed to Sidney Cox.
      London:  David Nutt (1914). First Edition. 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. Near Fine,  lacking
      the scarce dustwrapper.                             $20,000

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