It’s a lovely image that at first seems almost modest: A Frost poem won’t attempt to make a grand statement like The Waste Land, but merely to capture the homely contours of the human voice, forgoing elevated diction in favor of an effect that “principally has to do with tone,” as he would put it in an interview. Yet the longer one thinks about it, the more this conception of poetry appears almost absurdly ambitious, because it aspires to a universality that (Frost implies) lies behind words themselves, somewhere in the meaning-making capabilities of intonation and syntax. It’s one thing to say you’re going to write poems that sound like people talking; it’s quite another to say you’re going to capture the essence of what it means to talk—and especially to talk from a position of barely masked personal extremity, as Frost’s speakers often do.

And yet in the great work from the Derry years and the following interlude in England, that’s very nearly what he managed. A typical Frost poem resists the idea put forward by John Stuart Mill that poetry is “overheard”—which is to say that poems stand in relation to readers the way intimacies stand in relation to eavesdroppers. Frost doesn’t want to be overheard; he wants to be engaged. He wants to have, you might say, a conversation. (One of his lesser-known early poems is actually titled “A Time to Talk.”) Or maybe it would be better to say the appearance of a conversation: Even Frost’s most aggressively colloquial gestures lead to very unfamiliar territory, like hayrides that end on Mars. Consider “The Pasture,” which begins North of Boston, and which Frost considered so central to his project that he used it again as a preface to his Collected Poems:

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;

I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf

That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,

It totters when she licks it with her tongue.

I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

The poem is an invitation, obviously, but an invitation to what? Well, to remove vegetation from a pasture spring and to “fetch” a newborn calf. Yet the first task is unnecessary—cows will happily drink from a pool covered in grass—and therefore seems motivated more by a personal desire to “watch the water clear” than by any practical purpose. The second task is a necessity in dairy farming, but not in the benign way many readers might assume. As critic Robert Bernard Hass notes, a dairy farmer “fetches” a calf in order to separate it from its mother, so that the farmer himself can ensure that the calf is properly raised to produce milk. Frost’s project, the poem suggests, is to show that beauty and clarity are intertwined (waiting “to watch the water clear”), that this intertwining is a temporary luxury (the water will soon cloud over again), and that these moments occur against a backdrop that is anything but idyllic. The pasture, which is implicitly the poetry of Robert Frost, turns out to be a much more various and treacherous place than one might think.