Putting in the Seed

Robert Frost was as famous as any of his American contemporaries—including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein—but he was not like them. While these poets wrote in free verse and eschewed traditional forms, Frost was a formalist. Frost’s first book employed meter, rhyme, and traditional forms; his second book, North of Boston, is written mostly in blank verse. “Putting in the Seed” is a further example of Frost’s use of traditional forms because the poem is written in regular iambic pentameter and follows the rhyme-scheme ababababcdcdee. In fact, the poem is a sonnet, a traditional form. (For more on the form of the poem, please see the Literary Devices section.)

“Putting in the Seed” was first published in the journal Poetry and Drama in December of 1914, then later published in Frost’s third collection, Mountain Interval, in 1916 (Frost, Robert. The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969, p. 541). At this time, most American poets were, like Frost, writing in traditional forms, but that was all about to change.