A Further Range

The political content of this volume of poetry was obvious to contemporary readers. Frost admitted that A Further Range “has got a good deal more of the times in it than anything I ever wrote before...One well known paper called me a 'counter-revolutionary' for writing it.” Frost’s deep concerns about industrialization, organized labor, the New Deal and the decline of the family farm are apparent in poems such as “A Lone Striker”, “Build Soil” and “A Roadside Stand”.^[1]

The collection was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1937.^[2]

This volume is divided into 6 parts: 1-Taken Doubly; 2-Taken Singly; 3-Ten Mills; 4-The Outlands; 5-Build Soil; 6-Afterthought.

The dedication: "To E. F. for what it may mean to her that beyond the White Mountains were the Green; beyond both were the Rockies, the Sierras, and, in thought, the Andes and the Himalayas—range beyond range even into the realm of government and religion." "EF" is Elinor Frost, the poet's wife, to whom he dedicated every book of poetry until she died in 1938.^[3]

The poems had previously been published in The Saturday Review of Literature, The Yale Review, Poetry, Scribner’s Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Mercury, and Books, Direction and The New Frontier.