Robert Frost is commonly regarded by his American public as a poet of Nature, and on occasion likened by his critics to Vergil and Wordsworth. At first glance much of Frost’s poetry is unpretentious and simple, having the appearance of clever verbal charms and homely, parochial descriptions. His verse is modest in its diction, colloquial in its syntax and relies on ordinary experience. He affects the stance of the inspired but cool and shrewd New England observer and like Coleridge seems to believe:
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small.

But Frost’s apparent loyalty to the ordinary themes of earth and sky, to the heavens with their constellations and the small flowers with their insects, does not necessarily permit Frost to …