The overlap with the developing Frost persona was almost total. Audiences liked Frost because they found his chatty, unpretentious performances “sincere” or “true” or “unaffected.” The scholar Tyler Hoffman helpfully summarizes several such responses to Frost’s readings over the years in “Frost and the Public Performance of Poetry”:

Waco Times-Herald (Nov. 17, 1922): “The impression that Frost left with most of us was one of inexpressible gentleness, with humor and strength and whimsical sincerity.”

Emma Mae Leonhard in the English Journal (February 1952): “Frost’s reading is a truly conscientious performance, naturally and simply expressive, yet fully alive.”

Henry Popkin in Theatre Arts (February 1952): “. . . what lifts Frost’s performance out of the class of superior vaudeville is his homely, direct reading of his poetry, for which the rest of ‘the act’ provides an authentic but prosaic accompaniment.”

Thomas Lask in the New York Times (December 16, 1956): “In his reading Mr. Frost, now past 80, makes his verse sound more homespun than it is. He is not afraid to slur a word, break a rhythm.”

“His performance,” Hoffman observes, “is not felt to be in any way dramatic or rhetorical. . . . It is felt rather to be brimming with sympathetic values, a true expression of an inner self (kindly, tolerant, compassionate).” He sounded like a witty, rural sage; he wrote like a witty, rural sage; there must be some part of him that was a witty, rural sage. Recall the way in which Edward Thomas describes Frost’s poems: “They lack the exaggeration of rhetoric, and even at first sight appear to lack the poetic intensity of which rhetoric is an imitation.” As the poetry and the image of the poet began to converge, the terms of praise converged as well: natural, simple, sincere, and, perhaps most telling, authentic.

That perception of authenticity became Frost’s trademark, at least among general readers. This isn’t to say that audiences failed to understand that Frost’s writing and public readings were performances—as is clear from the above, the average journalist had no trouble linking a Frost lecture with “superior vaudeville.” But they were performances that seemed tied to an ordinary person who understood other ordinary people, and the silvery thread of that connection was something that listeners and readers believed could be relied upon. He seemed not so much a poet as a man who happened to write poetry. Here, for example, is how Time magazine described Frost in March of 1923, in a short article titled “He Digs His Songs from the Soil of Vermont” (emphases mine):

A poet of New England; but a poet first of all of the American character, Robert Frost is best known for his second volume of verse, North of Boston. Frost is a farmer by nature, that curious combination of dreamer and hardheaded Yankee, more characteristic of tillers of the soil than of poets. I like best to think of him sitting in the grass at the edge of a field back of his farmhouse in the Vermont hills. His large, nobly-formed head, with its loosely falling iron gray hair, bends slightly forward. He talks deliberately, softly, his somewhat piercing and remarkably blue eyes lighting now and then with mischievous humor.