This was entirely in keeping with Frost’s ambitions. “We must imagine the speaking voice,” said Frost—and the key to this claim lies in its choice of article: not a speaking voice, but the speaking voice. Frost’s poetry works in a register we should all recognize: It’s the way of talking that allows us to handle parent-teacher conferences or order food at drive-ins or exchange information after a fender bender. It’s a mutually agreed-upon voice, a civic voice. It is the voice of the neighbor next door, whom we may not know well but whom we rely upon if the power fails. The intimacy of that voice—and it is a kind of intimacy—suggests stability, normalcy, and authenticity. It’s the sum of the small daily repetitions and reassurances that hold a community together: It belongs to no one in particular, but everyone in general.

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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