Not so for Frost. At thirty-five, he was nobody even to the people to whom he might have been somebody. He’d published barely a dozen poems and a few stories in places like The Eastern Poultryman (yes, a journal for chicken farmers), and he was routinely rejected by literary editors in Boston and New York. It was a state of affairs that pricked his not inconsiderable ego. He’d been laboring at poetry since he graduated from high school, in 1892, and his devotion to that goal was challenged only by the iron relentlessness with which he had pursued his eventual wife, Elinor White. But it wasn’t until 1912, when he was thirty-eight and his first book, A Boy’s Will, was accepted by an English publisher, that Frost had any literary success to speak of.

Within four years, however, that book had sold more than twenty thousand copies in the United States—the equivalent of well over sixty thousand today—and Frost was abruptly among the country’s best-known poets. There is no satisfying parallel in American literature for the rapidity of Frost’s ascent, given the lateness of his first recognition; it’s the kind of phenomenon for which the cliché “meteoric rise” is barely adequate. (By contrast, Wallace Stevens, who was born within five years of Frost, didn’t arrive at his canonical position until age seventy, having seen his reputation rise for decades with the stately inevitability of a hot-air balloon.) Frost went almost immediately from being nobody to being not just somebody, but somebody whom other somebodies might want to court, or belittle, or appraise, or make pacts with. And this happened so quickly that the Robert Frost who had been alone with his family and his poetry for years vanished almost immediately behind a popular construction of “Robert Frost” that survives as a cultural touchstone to this day.

So deciding who—or what—Robert Frost actually was became an especially complex task. It became the kind of undertaking in which, as with “The Road Not Taken,” it was possible to feel manipulated, or even tricked. This would turn out to matter both for Robert Frost the poet and for “Robert Frost” the national emblem.

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BEFORE GOING FURTHER into the complications of Frost’s biography, it’s necessary to understand its basic outline and the rough shape of the work to which it’s inevitably linked. Frost was born in 1874, in San Francisco, to a shy, deeply religious mother who is often described as “overprotective” and a journalist father who idolized Robert E. Lee as a boy (thus Frost’s middle name), despite having been born in New England, and who supposedly carried around a Colt pistol, just in case anyone needed shooting. Frost had one sister, Jeanie, who struggled with physical infirmities and mental illness for most of her life.