The land was ours before we were the land’s.

She was our land more than a hundred years

Before we were her people. . . .

The granitic lines of the poem—which, like those of “The Road Not Taken,” are both resonant and deceptive—rise irresistibly into the foreground. The moment is saved.

The next year, Kennedy would send Frost to Russia, where he would meet with Khrushchev. Though he would bungle the visit by announcing upon his return that the premier had described Americans as “too liberal to fight”—a remark invented by Frost, much to Kennedy’s annoyance—he nonetheless had the distinction of being the only American poet ever to have spoken frankly with both of the midcentury’s great leaders. “God wants us to contend,” he told Khrushchev. When Frost died, the next year, his obituary, which appeared above the fold on the front page of the New York Times, ran more than 2,500 words and included this tribute from Kennedy: “There is a story that some years ago an interested mother wrote to a principal of a school, ‘Don’t teach my boy poetry, he’s going to run for Congress.’ I’ve never taken the view that the world of politics and the world of poetry are so far apart.” They are united, Kennedy suggests, because their greatness depends on “courage”—it is what makes, as Frost might put it, “all the difference.”

____

THAT, OF COURSE, would be a fine place for the story to end. But for a writer of Frost’s density and vigor, the measurable life of the actual man is only a small part of the myth of the poet, which expands with the inexorability of kudzu through posthumous reevaluations of the work, posthumous discoveries of letters, diaries, and unpublished scraps, posthumous recollections of decades-old conversations, and, more than anything else, posthumous summaries of the life itself by biographers. As Auden puts it, with reference to Yeats, a great poet eventually becomes “his admirers,” though people quoting Auden often forget that he adds, only four lines later, that Yeats will also be “punished under a foreign code of conscience.” A dead writer often finds himself at the mercy of something other than friends.

And this is where the story of Robert Frost and “Robert Frost” becomes very strange indeed. Other major writers have had biographers who did them no favors, but Frost is the only significant poet to have an official biographer who actively despised him. In 1939, Lawrance Thompson was a Princeton professor who had long been, as he put it, “a Frost addict.” (He had first met him in 1925, when he was an undergraduate at Wesleyan, and Frost subsequently supervised his dissertation at Columbia.) After another biographer died unexpectedly, Frost offered to let Thompson take the job in an exclusive capacity and with the poet’s cooperation, so long as Thompson agreed to publish the book only after Frost’s death. Thompson suggested that a closer friend might be more appropriate, but Frost rejected the suggestion on the grounds that such a person would be insufficiently objective—a decision so ironic that it’s tempting to say it belongs in a Frost poem.