Despite the stereotype of being the Norman Rockwell of verse, Robert Frost’s standing, even sixty-one years after his death, remains blue-chip, still perhaps the most famous American poet among the general public. Frost’s work remains anthologized and interpreted, and taught in secondary and undergraduate classrooms; his lyrics among the handful that can be expected to be namedropped as a reader’s favorite poem (two roads and all of that). If anything, Frost has suffered from the albatross of presumed accessibility. Among the luminaries of American Modernism, Ezra Pound was experimental, T.S. Eliot cerebral, H.D. hermetic, Langston Hughes revolutionary, Wallace Stevens incandescent, and William Carlos Williams visionary, but Frost is readable. David Orr writes in his excellent book-length close reading The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong (2015) that Frost is a poet whose “signature phrases have become so ubiquitous, so much a part of everything from coffee mugs to refrigerator magnets to graduation speeches” that it can become easy to forget the man who penned such phrases.
Because he was a committed formalist—not just an enthusiast of meter, but of rhyme for heaven’s sake—Frost has rightly or wrongly been categorized as an unrepentant poetic irredentist, a temperamental conservative in a movement enthralled to Ezra Pound’s exhortation to “Make it new.” That Frost was an immaculate conveyer of traditional literary forms—no jingle man but rather a subtle deployer of meter and rhyme, of rhythm and enjambment—doesn’t exonerate his formalism for some critics, and for others might even make it worse. A poet who was slurred in a 1936 edition of The Saturday Review of Literature by the (now-forgotten) critic William Rose Benét as being merely a “wise old woodchuck,” perhaps worthy of his four Pulitzers, but thankfully never given a Nobel. This is the maudlin straw-poet of snowy blanketed New England fields and of mossy stone cairns, the sentimentalist of autumnal orange and summer’s first green being gold; this is the saccharine Poet Laureate of Vermont, the favored homespun bard of President John F. Kennedy enlisted to read at the 1960 inauguration, and who recited his verse from memory after being blinded by the sunny brightness of a Washington January. The poet incongruously born in California (of all places!) who through sheer-force-of-will molded himself into the voice of New England, for whom the land was his before he was the land’s. A regionally rusticated American pastoralist fit for inspirational posters and needlepoint.