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IT WAS SHORTLY AFTER the appearance of A Boy’s Will—just as the glitter of eventual success was becoming evident—that Frost met the English critic Edward Thomas, who he would later claim inspired “The Road Not Taken.” The two writers galvanized each other. Thomas was a widely admired book reviewer and essayist, but his own poetic ambitions had largely gone by the wayside as he churned out literary journalism in order to support three children. Frost urged him to take up poetry, which he did to great, if still undervalued, success. (“You are a poet or you are nothing,” Frost wrote to Thomas in 1915, adding, in exactingly roundabout fashion, “But you are not psychologist enough to know that no one not come at in just the right way will ever recognize you.”) For his part, Thomas reviewed Frost’s second collection, North of Boston, no fewer than three times, producing some of the sharpest early criticism of Frost. “These poems are revolutionary,” he wrote in 1914, “because they lack the exaggeration of rhetoric, and even at first sight appear to lack the poetic intensity of which rhetoric is an imitation.”

Thomas was right—and in particular, he was right to see Frost’s achievement as antirhetorical, if not antipoetic. Frost’s poetry, like Wordsworth’s, takes as its launching point the common speech of ordinary people: The poet is “a man speaking to men,” in Wordsworth’s formulation. Frost himself is famous for declaring that poetry should be constructed from “sentence sounds,” which he contrasted with the idea that poetry was “a matter of harmonized vowels and consonants.” (He had in mind here the verse of Tennyson and Swinburne, in which it was common to find overpollinated lines like “The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm.”) In Frost’s view, the “sound of sense” to be found in great poetry was actually distinct from words as such, which can often express the opposite of their own semantic definitions.

Most of us understand this idea intuitively; we all know that the word “right” can be said in many ways to mean many different things, some of them very far from anything one would find in the dictionary entry for “right.” (“I’m sure you’ve forgiven me by now.” “Riiiight.”) And of course, all poetry relies to an extent on the indeterminacy of language. But Frost’s writing seems not merely to rely on this indeterminacy, but to heighten and celebrate it. “All the fun’s in how you say a thing,” as he writes in “The Mountain”—and it’s telling that the fun is in how you “say” a thing rather than how you “write” a thing. If Frost believed that poetry’s strength lies in its ability to convey multiple meanings simultaneously, then he was equally committed to the idea that this ability depends on taking the rhythms of everyday speech as a model for poetic expression. We hear the essence of a poem, he believed, in the way that we hear “voices behind a door that cuts off the words.”