When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay

As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them

Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning

After a rain. . . .

“Often you must have seen them”: We’re explicitly included in the poem, and in a way that quietly suggests that the speaker should be taken as our representative—as “one of us.” (I have seen birches, he says, so you have probably seen them.) Moreover, the easy casualness of the lines (“I like to think some boy’s been swinging them”) invites us to think of the poem as a conversation in which we’re participating rather than, by contrast, a revelation we’re being permitted to overhear. The effect is to establish a relation between speaker and reader that resembles the relationship between friendly neighbors more than it does the relationship between prophet and witness, or madman and bystander. (It’s no coincidence that the word “neighbor” appears more than a dozen times in Frost’s poetry, but not once in T. S. Eliot’s.) Similar things could be said of Frost’s public lectures, which strongly appealed to audiences’ taste for the homespun intertwining of the everyday and the ordinary.

That appeal matters because the behavior of artists in their actual lives is judged more personally (and often more harshly) if an audience feels the behavior reflects on them, or in some way violates expectations encouraged by the work. Again, the example of a neighbor is instructive. Imagine that you have a neighbor with whom you’ve become not exactly close, but companionable. You and he have friendly exchanges on a regular basis, he lets your kids play in his yard, maybe he collects your mail if you go on a trip. You don’t really know each other, but he seems like a generous, decent person, and you feel you have an understanding. Then one day, when looking after your neighbor’s house while he’s on vacation, you find a book lying open on his floor that has fallen off a shelf. It’s a screed denying the Holocaust. A little Internet research reveals that in his spare time, your neighbor runs a conspiracy-theory website that traffics heavily in anti-Jewish slander. The website in no way advocates violence, and you’ve never seen your neighbor so much as scold his dog—you have no reason to think he’s in any way a threat. But his behavior will probably preoccupy you now in a way that the behavior of some unknown, unnamed random person who runs a loathsome website never would.