“I like best to think of him sitting in the grass”: You can’t get much earthier than that. The Robert Frost described here is almost completely different from the complex, sensitive, vain, depressed, difficult man who wrote the actual poems, the one who had moved more than twenty times and who had really spent only about five years farming. Yet this version of “Robert Frost” can’t be entirely separated from the other and was, for better or worse, essential to Frost’s enormous success. Within nine years of his return to the United States, he had won his first Pulitzer Prize; he would go on to collect three more, making him the most awarded poet in American history. By the time his Complete Poems was issued, in 1949, his books had sold nearly 400,000 copies, which is equivalent to more than 750,000 today. That same year, Time featured him on its cover, echoing the magazine’s previous endorsement:

On the Vermont hills about Ripton, the red fires of autumn smoldered on the swamp maples and sumac, crept inward from branch tips, inched downward into the valley where the river brawls through the gorge. From a slab-wood cabin with its back set firmly against the valley’s shoulder, cooking his own meals and dependent on no man, 76-year-old Poet Robert Frost last week faced the world. It is the vantage point he likes best.

Give me, one is tempted to say, a break. (The article goes on to mention Frost’s “fierce blue eyes” twice.) And yet if this version of “Robert Frost” isn’t right, neither is it entirely wrong—there is an odd twinning or doubling that allows the author of the article, while delivering a series of embarrassingly romantic comments about the poet (“the heavy, big-knuckled hand shaped to axhelve and pitchfork”), to make observations about the poetry that show an appreciation for its creator’s decidedly un-romantic intentions: “The result was a deceptively artless poetry of common speech . . . partly serious when it seemed most irreverent, gently mocking when it seemed most grave.” It’s as if understanding Frost meant misunderstanding him at the same time.