There are two points worth pausing over here. First, Frost’s assumption that Pound and Eliot were interested in being “caviare” is the exaggerated version of an actual truth: Eliot wanted an audience for his poetry that was small, immensely learned, and (to take a quote of his slightly out of context) “very intelligent.” If Frost wanted to reach out to the untrained many, Eliot wanted to pull back to the specialized few. And it is Eliot’s ambition—with its concomitant assumption that poetry should not only be difficult but look difficult—that has given us the standard view of literary modernism as the art of self-conscious alienation. (The continuing dominance of that view is why it is still possible to see articles on Frost begin with sentences like these, from Slate in 2010: “Is Robert Frost . . . a modern poet? Or, in an academic refinement of the term, is he a Modernist?”) Second, Frost’s desire to be a poet “for all sorts and kinds” is perhaps not quite so generous and undesigning as it sounds. Addressing all sorts, after all, means failing to address any particular sort. Rather than seeking an audience, however small, that was fully equipped to understand his poetry, Frost pursued a multitude of audiences, each of which perceived only parts of him, and only from a certain angle. To hold these disparate groups together required the constant attentiveness of a veteran politician.

And Frost pays a price for that solicitousness, not the least of which is that some readers struggle to separate his poetry from the banalities of the day-to-day talk upon which it relies. It can be hard to see past the “New England torpor,” as Eliot put it, to the canny artist. Yet even at his most colloquial, Frost is only rarely truly commonplace. Consider this passage from “A Servant to Servants” (the speaker is a woman who has spent time in an asylum, or so she says, and who now lives in domestic drudgery as the companion of an amiably dull farmer named Len):

It seems to me

I can’t express my feelings any more

Than I can raise my voice or want to lift

My hand (oh, I can lift it when I have to).

Did ever you feel so? I hope you never.

It’s got so I don’t even know for sure

Whether I am glad, sorry, or anything.

There’s nothing but a voice-like left inside

That seems to tell me how I ought to feel,

And would feel if I wasn’t all gone wrong.

You take the lake. I look and look at it.

I see it’s a fair, pretty sheet of water.

I stand and make myself repeat out loud

The advantages it has, so long and narrow,

Like a deep piece of some old running river

Cut short off at both ends. It lies five miles

Straight away through the mountain notch

From the sink window where I wash the plates,

And all our storms come up toward the house,