The point is that while we judge people by their actions, that judgment is heavily colored by the terms of the relationship we believe has been extended to us. In Frost’s case, the strangely intemperate response to his pedestrian, if unfortunate, flaws arises in part from the intimacy his work encourages. We thought we had an understanding. Remember that Frost says “effects of actuality and intimacy are the greatest aim an artist can have. The sense of intimacy gives the thrill of sincerity.” An “effect” of actuality or intimacy is a symbol, not a pledge, but it’s a testament to Frost’s skill that he can blur that division so successfully.

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YET IF IT’S NOT HARD to understand why a word as excessive as “monster” might be applied to Frost—however unfairly—that still fails to explain why “monster,” in particular, has become the condemnation of choice. Here we have to look at the very carefully managed nature of the intimacy Frost encourages, and the equally carefully managed persona he developed. After all, other writers also have sought a “sense of intimacy” with readers, but not all intimacies are the same. The English poet Philip Larkin, for example, encouraged readers to find in his work the small, vulnerable part of themselves that feels put down or rejected by larger forces—the part that feels shame, that feels itself to be (unjustly, maybe) an object of disgust. (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” begins his most famous poem.) The tactic is similar to Frost’s methods, and it’s therefore no coincidence that the publication of Larkin’s biographical materials caused a scandal almost identical to Frost’s. (To one reviewer, Larkin’s letters were “a distressing and in many ways revolting compilation which imperfectly reveals and conceals the sewer under the national monument Larkin became.”)

But Larkin isn’t Frost. Larkin was widely perceived as expressing a certain wry, enduring aspect of English character, but it would have been nearly impossible to imagine him reading at, for example, a royal wedding. The relationship a reader enters into with Larkin’s poetry seems more personal, as if he were a slightly dissolute but much loved uncle who embodies many of our own fears and doubts, and by doing so redeems them. Frost was another matter entirely. As Trilling noted in his infamous speech, by the middle of the century Frost had become “virtually a symbol of America . . . not unlike an articulate . . . Bald Eagle.” Even Vendler calls him “the Great Stone Face of American letters.” Over and over, Frost is described as if he were not merely a public figure, but in some way public property. Upon his death, the New York Times claimed that he “symbolize[d] the rough-hewn individuality of the American creative spirit more than any other man.”