Here it’s helpful to think a little about monsters—or, at any rate, about the word “monster.” In summarizing Frost’s biographical controversies, Pritchard writes that “the man who had been placed on a pedestal and worshipped in classrooms all over America was now seen—so the presumption went—for what he had really been all along: a monster in human form.” Pritchard didn’t seize on the word willfully: Not only had Vendler used it twice in her influential review of the Thompson biography, but variations on it had been deployed by several other writers. (Frost possessed “demonic vileness,” according to novelist Harold Brodkey.) And as I said, the “monster myth” remains a journalistic catchphrase; typing “Robert Frost” and “monster” into Google will net you a quarter of a million results.

The word “monster” is a curious choice, not least because “fraud” or “hypocrite” or even plain old “jerk” would seem at first glance to be more applicable to the behavior at issue. After all, what is Frost accused of doing—or failing to do—that merits the word “monster”? The clearest statement of the charges appears in a review of the second volume of Thompson’s biography by Vendler, who was particularly appalled by Frost’s alleged mistreatment of his son Carol, who killed himself in 1940 (Vendler appears to be alone among Frost critics in arguing that Thompson was insufficiently hostile to the poet):

Nevertheless, Thompson is capable of criminal blandness. He says placidly of Frost’s son Carol: “There had never been any sustained affection between him and his father, and on many occasions each had antagonized the other in ways that had built up lasting enmities.” Surely this is to apportion blame equally; Thompson forgets that Carol was a baby and Frost a man when it all started. What is a father who has no “sustained affection” for his son but a monster?

One suspects that the reason that last sentence was written as a rhetorical question is that if it were rephrased as an assertion—“A father who has no ‘sustained affection’ for his son is a monster”—it would sound overheated. If being a difficult father made a man into a “monster,” then goblin armies would lurk in every suburb in America. Frost may indeed have behaved badly toward his son, but Carol committed suicide at age thirty-eight, not age sixteen, and it seems remarkably ungenerous to Frost, to Carol, and to Carol’s family to put the poet (then nearly seventy years old) at the center of that sad story.

So if critics aren’t reaching for a word like “monster” in response to Frost’s actual behavior, they must be attracted to it for some other reason. That reason, I suspect, has to do with the “thrill of sincerity” to be found in both Frost’s poetry and in his public performances. Consider the relation between reader and speaker that is implied at the beginning of a well-known poem like “Birches”: