By the middle of the twentieth century, Robert Frost was the best-loved poet in America. He was our nation’s bard, simple and sincere, accompanying us on wooded roads and articulating our hopes and fears.
Who is your Robert Frost? Homespun wise poet sage? Sharp-witted trickster? A poet whose simplicity hides startling depth? Cranky old poet?
I read Maggie Doherty’s piece, titled “The Many Guises of Robert Frost," in The New Yorker, which explores how the poet constructed an image of simplicity. That simplicity was part of his public persona and also his poetic style, but he was more complex and often contradictory. Doherty is reviewing Adam Plunkett's 2025 book Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry.
Early on, I considered Frost to be the persona of a rural, unassuming farmer-poet. I saw him like the photo on the cover of Plunkett's book. I liked that Frost was not like the literary elites in Boston or London. Later, I found that he was highly learned and deeply engaged with the literary tradition. A mask.
It seems like everyone had to read "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not Taken" in high school. You could read them in a sincere or ironic way. I heard from teachers interpretations that ranged from celebratory to somber or even nihilistic. Was he stopping in the woods and considering suicide? Frost would shake off such interpretations.
Frost embraced ambiguity. In a 1960 interview with The Paris Review, he described himself as liking “to fool… to be mischievous,” operating through “suggestiveness and double entendre.” He often hinted at multiple meanings rather than stating anything outright.
He wasn't a modernist in rebellion like some contemporaries. If you were writing a serious college paper on him, you could get into how he reworked canonical forms and references from Shakespeare’s “Carpe Diem” songs to Coleridge. He adapted rather than invented.
Robert Frost’s first four published books of verse, established his reputation as a preeminent American poet. A Boy’s Will (1913) is full of New England themes, traditional meters with colloquial language. next was North of Boston (1914), includes “Mending Wall,” and the rural scenes have deeper philosophical meanings. His third book, Mountain Interval (1916), contains “The Road Not Taken.” The fourth book, New Hampshire (1923), earned him his first Pulitzer Prize and includes “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
Frost’s late life was marked by grief, strained family ties, allegations of infidelity, and an abrasive public image that contrasted sharply with his genteel public persona.
It seems that Frost viewed his contradictions not as flaws but as essential to his poetic vitality. He credited “animus”—inner drive and conflict—as a key source of his creativity and was pleased when T. S. Eliot praised him as the “most eminent… Anglo-American poet now living.”
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