After Apple-Picking

Though both scholars and the public consider Frost the quintessential New England poet, he spent the first 11 years of his life in San Francisco. At the beginning of his poetry career, Frost found little success in the United States. In 1912, he traveled to Britain, where he met, and became heavily influenced by, such poets as Edward Thomas, Ezra Pound, and Robert Graves. Frost also interacted with Rupert Brooke. However, because Frost avoided World War I, his poetry would not develop socio-historical undertones influenced by the war as Graves’s and Brooke’s work did. Like these poets, themes of death, grief, loss, and despair overshadowed Frost’s work: He buried both of his parents, his sister, his wife, and four of his six children.

Published in 1914, the release of “After Apple-Picking” in North of Boston coincided with a swath of events that forever reshaped the world, including the assassination of Archduke Frances Ferdinand, Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war against Serbia, which began World War I, and Germany’s invasion of Luxembourg and Belgium. In the United States, the declaration of World War I caused great upheaval given the former’s powerful position on the world stage. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand sparked stateside incidences like the Lexington Avenue Bombing, in which an anarchist killed four people with a bomb intended for John D. Rockefeller.

More relevant to Frost’s work and the genre of nature poetry that followed, 1914 also saw the demise of the passenger pigeon, when Martha, the final one of the species, passed away at the Cincinnati Zoo.