And what lies outside the civitas, as the Romans might say? Everything that is chaotic, barbaric, and fraudulent—everything that is monstrous. Frost himself understood this quite well. Here he is writing to the Amherst Student on the subject of form, by which he means much more than poetic form:

The artist, the poet might be expected to be the most aware of such assurance [of form]. But it is really everybody’s sanity to feel it and live by it. Fortunately, too, no forms are more engrossing[,] gratifying, comforting, staying than those lesser ones we throw off, like vortex rings of smoke, all our individual enterprise and needing nobody’s cooperation; a basket, a letter, a garden, a room, an idea, a picture, a poem. . . . The background is hugeness and confusion shading away from where we stand into black and utter chaos; and against the background any small man-made figure of order and concentration. What pleasanter than that this should be so? . . . To me any little form I assert upon it is velvet, as the saying is, and to be considered for how much more it is than nothing.

For Frost, the natural state of the world is lightless turmoil, and the small creations of isolated people are all that shines—for a moment—in that darkness. It’s no surprise that when some readers felt that Frost’s life might call into question the relationship his poetry seemed to offer, they reached for terms that signaled the opposite of that relationship. They looked away from Frost’s forms and pointed at the shadow behind them. They pointed at its chaotic composition, at its refusal to adhere to patterns they thought it had adopted, at its bottomless appetite. They pointed at a monster.

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FROST IS ALWAYS BEING RESCUED, always being reclaimed. He’s like a disputed frontier, constantly contested, and this book is yet another stone thrown in that conflict. “No sweeter music can come to my ears,” said Frost, “than the clash of arms over my dead body when I am down.” But it’s worth wondering whether the question ought not be what side a reader has taken with regard to Frost—benevolent or terrifying, modern poet or folk bard—but which choice a reader feels he has to confront. Because Frost trails contradictions like the wake from a battleship. Should we question his popularity, which seems so at odds with his massive erudition and technical accomplishment? Should we question his sincerity, which seems so dubious when one reads the scornful letters he wrote about his peers, and even his friends? Should we worry he is too much like us, or not enough?

Better, maybe, to think of Frost as a poet who asks us to ask these sorts of questions. It doesn’t matter whether the “real” Frost is courtly or frightening, because the point is simply to make us wonder about “realness,” about authenticity, about what it would mean to be truly sincere. In this sense, Frost is always placing us at the beginning of his most famous poem: