Embedded in Our Subsoil

"[My] utmost ambition," Robert Frost claimed, "is to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of." He succeeded. Fragments of Frost's handmade poems turn up in the subsoil of the American mind like arrowheads or old farm tools.

Ulysses Grant sat in the White House when Frost was born; John Kennedy was 10 months away from assassination when Frost died. During the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy would end his set political speech by saying: "But I have miles to go before I sleep." Everyone recognized the line. As Jay Parini remarks in a judicious new biography, Robert Frost: A Life (Henry Holt; 514 pages; $35), it is almost impossible not to memorize "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Like the best of Frost's lyrics, the lines have a mysterious inevitability.

Frost's personal reputation was knocked off the pedestal some years ago. In the 1960s, Lawrance Thompson, his official biographer and onetime friend, published a three-volume life that was in many ways hostile. Revisionism is one of the cheap thrills of literary biography. Thompson reported that Frost had been, behind his endearing facade, something of a monster. He described, for example, the night Frost's daughter Lesley stumbled downstairs into the kitchen when her parents were fighting. Frost was holding a revolver, according to Thompson, and the poet told Lesley to choose which parent she preferred, since one of them would be dead by morning.

It's an ugly story; Parini doubts it is true. Lesley's daughter Lesley Lee Francis told Parini, "In all the years my mother and I talked about her father, there was never any mention of this scene. And, indeed, she was prone to nightmares, especially in childhood."

No intelligent reader doubts that Frost had a dark side. Dread--of the "beast" waiting in night and cold, of Frost's forsaken conviction that "there is no oversight of human affairs"--gnaws at the edges of his work. Frost was not writing Hallmark cards.

Parini, a balanced, sophisticated reader, does not draw straight lines between the poems and the life. But abnormally dark threads (ill health, mental instability, suicide) do run through the Frost family story. In the midst of much suffering and bad luck, Parini finds Frost to have been, on the whole, an admirable husband and father, deeply engaged in his children's upbringing and supporting them far into adulthood.

Parini, himself a novelist and a poet, is something of a partisan--"Robert Frost has been my favorite poet ever since the ninth grade"--but his readings of the poems and of the man are shrewd. Frost had what might be called a limited greatness. Parini's dust jacket calls him "the only truly 'national poet' America has yet produced." No. That would still be Whitman.