To seem perfectly ordinary and utterly unique at the same time: This was Frost’s ambition. And as he rightly noted, it would encourage a “sense of intimacy” that would raise questions of sincerity. A “sense” of intimacy, after all, isn’t actual intimacy, and the “thrill” of sincerity doesn’t require that anyone was really sincere. They are “effects of actuality,” in Frost’s finely paradoxical phrase. They involve, one might say, a performance.

THE IDEA OF PERFORMANCE was central to Frost’s poetry from the beginning, but after he returned to the United States in 1915, it began to be a factor in his public presence as well. Though he had considerable teaching experience, Frost was much less practiced at delivering his poems; in one of his first public “readings,” in 1906, his poetry was actually read by a local minister because Frost was too tongue-tied to do it himself. But as he resettled his family in America—the Frosts purchased yet another farm, this time in Franconia, New Hampshire—Frost became increasingly adept at projecting the persona that would soon become his trademark. That persona was essentially an exaggerated version of the farmer he had once been, or nearly been. He began to take on the look and speech cadences of a rough-hewn, slightly salty Yankee man of the soil, dropping vowels into the back of his throat, spicing up his conversation with seemingly impromptu epigrams, and dressing as if he might at any moment do something intriguingly rustic. According to Louis Untermeyer, a literary critic who would become one of his most ardent supporters, Frost didn’t lecture to his early audiences so much as he “talked, and as he grew more at ease with people, talked in what seemed a haphazard assortment of comments that developed into a shrewd commentary on poetry as it related to the state of the world.” Indeed, “he never ‘recited’ his poems, he ‘said’ them—sometimes, especially if they were new or short, he ‘said’ them twice. ‘Would you like to hear me say that one again?’ he would inquire.” It took years for Frost to overcome the anxiety he felt before a reading, so the studied informality he cultivated upon his return home wasn’t so much an affectation as a kind of armor.

That armor was necessary, because as the critic William Pritchard puts it, his arrival in New York from England was “accompanied by one piece of good fortune after another,” and each piece seemed to call for more personal contact with the newly discovered farmer-poet Robert Frost. The day the family disembarked, Frost picked up a copy of The New Republic, only to find a favorable review of North of Boston written by Amy Lowell, the doyenne of American poetry. Soon he was being squired around Boston by the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, congratulated by professors at Harvard, written up in the Boston Herald, praised by the Chicago Evening Post, touted in Harper’s by William Dean Howells (commonly referred to as “the Dean of American Letters”), interviewed by the Boston Post, and invited to give reading after reading after reading. Some of this attention was of Frost’s own devising—for most of his life, he was an adroit if unsubtle behind-the-scenes manager of his own career. (A typical remark in a letter to Louis Untermeyer: “You make the point that there must be many poetical moods that haven’t been reduced to poetry. Thanks most of all for seeing that and saying it in a review of [a] book by me.”) But much of the attention given to Frost was simply the result of readers’ being captivated by the “thrill of sincerity” they felt they found in his poetry.