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.”

But, as with most aspects of Frost’s persona, his simplicity was a pose, an act, one that concealed its opposite. Frost was very much a man of letters, a classicist and, alongside his future wife, Elinor, a co-valedictorian of his high school, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was steeped in the literary tradition, as well as in philosophy and psychology (he was a big fan of William James). Ambitious and competitive, he orchestrated positive reviews of his early work and became enraged about negative reviews of later collections. A failed poultry farmer and a listless homesteader, he never quite fit in with the country people who populate his poems.

The poems, too, are deceptive. A Frost verse may be written in plain language, but it is tonally ambiguous and open to competing interpretations. Take “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” from 1923, which ends like this:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Are these lines said gratefully or ruefully? Is the speaker appreciating a peaceful winter scene or barely suppressing a death wish? One could ask similar questions about “The Road Not Taken”: How sincere is our speaker, who imagines his future self “telling this with a sigh”? Has his choice of road made any difference at all? It’s tempting to understand the poem as ironical—a “cunning nugget of nihilism,” as Dan Chiasson wrote in this magazine—but, as soon as you do, its rousing ending and triumphant “I” urge you to consider that it may well be in earnest.

To read Frost is to wonder which parts of a poem to take seriously—and to sense his presence over your shoulder, laughing at your mistakes. “I like to fool . . . to be mischievous,” he told the critic Richard Poirier in an interview, in 1960, for The Paris Review. One could, he suggested, “unsay everything I said, nearly.” By his own account, he operated by “suggestiveness and double entendre and hinting”; he never said anything outright, and, if he seemed to, then suspicion was warranted. In both his poetry and his personal life, Frost was a trickster, saying one thing and almost always meaning another, and perhaps another still. He was like the playful boy described in the lovely poem “Birches” (1915), bending tree branches beyond recognition, then letting them snap back to their natural state, all for his own amusement. As readers of his poetry, we’re just along for the ride.