CATCH ME IF YOU CAN

The many guises of Robert Frost.

- MAGGIE DOHERTY

Robert Frost presented himself as a simple man. Not for him the literary circles of London or the stilted dinner parties of Brahmin Boston. Nor was he at home in academia. He dropped out of college twice, citing a need for independence, and although he spent his middle and later years teaching at universities, he was constantly fleeing them, retreating to farms in rural New England. He didn't read book reviews or so he claimed and he didn't write them, preferring instead to let his poems find their natural audience, which turned out to be a wide one. He mocked literary critics and shunned intellectual debate, though he was a great talker and loved to tell stories. His ideal days, he said, were spent in the countryside, going on long, solitary walks or chatting with his farmer neighbors, appreciating the patterns and tones of their speech.

The simplicity of his life informed his work. Ascending to fame at a time when Anglo-American poetry was growing increasingly difficult and obscure, Frost set himself apart. A lyric poet inspired by Longfellow, he described the hard lives of country folk-a war widow, a hired man-and the hard landscapes that they worked to tame. In "Out, Out-,"" a poem from 1916, a boy loses his hand to a buzz saw and dies, perhaps from shock; his family, "since they/Were not the ones dead," swiftly move on. Some of Frost's poems have the lilting quality of lullabies; others seem to deliver their morals in unambiguous terms. "I took the one less traveled by," declares the speaker of "The Road Not Taken," perhaps Frost's most famous poem, after meeting a fork in the path. "And that has made all the difference." His were, and still are, poems for everyone: schoolchildren, casual readers, the makers of greeting cards. One doesn't need to be versed in the literary tradition to read a poem by Frost-only, as one poem goes, to be "versed in country things."