When Robert Frost, in his 1930 address “Education by Poetry,” spoke about the importance of being “at home in the metaphor,” he seemed to suggest how infrequently he had felt at home anywhere else. The New England landscape abounds with Frost sites: the Frost Farm, in Derry, New Hampshire, and the Frost Place, in Franconia, New Hampshire; the Robert Frost Stone House, in South Shaftsbury, Vermont, and the Homer Noble Farm, in Ripton, Vermont; a house on verdant Brewster Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one on leafy Sunset Avenue in Amherst, Massachusetts. Add to these two houses in England, where Frost lived from 1912 to 1915 and first found acclaim, along with a cottage in Key West, where he often spent winters, and a white pillared house that once stood in Ann Arbor, Michigan (where Frost lived while he worked at the University of Michigan, in the twenties), but was moved by Henry Ford to Greenfield Village, a part of Ford’s museum complex. It now sits on a cleansed American green, near Edison’s laboratories, the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop, and a courthouse where Lincoln practiced law.

Frost’s stone walls, old barns, cellar holes, birches, and brooks—the sedimentary, second-growth New England that, before Frost, had awaited its bard—imply a writer who cared, like Thoreau, only to be “admitted to Nature’s hearth.” But, wherever he went, Frost schemed to buy land or a house or a farm. Frost is sometimes still associated with the old-fashioned comforts of home, but in reality he was frequently on the move, spending, and often squandering, whatever investments of the heart and the wallet he had lately made. Those cozy houses and picturesque farms that litter the countryside make a trail of places Frost fled. Emerson, whose work he always kept nearby, suggests the fitting motto: “Everything good is on the highway.” And yet Frost never really lit out for the territories; instead, he moved among carbon-copy small farms with mountain views, and smart Victorians on the fringes of campuses, where, having escaped the “academic ways” he always said he loathed, he could return day after day.

Throughout his life, Frost moved into things so he could move out. He does this in language, too, veering toward certainties in order to evade them. He knew, like his “Oven Bird,” how “in singing not to sing.” Frost can be trying company, but he is company: no modern poet draws us so close, though what he does to us at close range is often impolite. If a reader knows only one poem by Frost, it is likely “The Road Not Taken,” that cunning nugget of nihilism disguised as an anthem for nonconformity. A quick Google search turns up mugs, T-shirts, and posters, as well as customizable business cards, all quoting the poem. What tends to be forgotten is the barbed tangle of tenses at its close:

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.

The primary “I” in the poem isn’t the one doing the “sighing”; that’s a later version of the self that this current version, though moving steadily in its direction, finds pitiable. Look up the word “all” in the dictionary, and you will find that it means “the whole amount or quantity of.” In Frost, the word is always sad. So often in his work, the whole of something adds up to much less than one had hoped.

Because Frost is so mercurial, many people feel they have a claim upon him. Heads of Frost, in bronze or stone, are standard clutter for town libraries and English-department common rooms (there’s a wobbly-looking one down the hall from where I am writing this). A man named Mitchel Potter was arrested in 2012 for stealing a bust of Frost from Wichita State twenty-five years earlier, after, he said, he’d done “a lot of beer bongs.” Some local teen-agers in Middlebury, Vermont, broke into the Ripton farm a few winters ago, and partied and urinated on the floors. Their sentence involved taking a mini-class in Frost’s poetry. The aged Frost appears in Tobias Wolff’s novel “Old School,” jesting with the boys at a fictional boarding school and inspiring, in the students, “fits of dignity.” There is the “dark Frost” recommended by Lionel Trilling in the late fifties, a “terrifying poet,” and the shuffling, windswept sage of Kennedy’s inaugural, reciting “The Gift Outright” from memory. Poets have come the closest to rendering the “offstage” Frost. Robert Lowell punned on Coleridge (“Robert Frost at midnight, the audience gone / to vapor”) in his sonnet for Frost, and John Berryman, who remembered both Frost’s “malice” and his “good / big face,” put it succinctly: “For a while here we possessed / an unusual man.”

It can sometimes seem, from the surfeit of images of Frost in his later years, that he was born old, incapable of youth in the same way John Keats is incapable of age. “The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume I: 1886-1920,” edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen, part of a heroic effort by Harvard University Press to collect all Frost’s writings in a definitive edition, goes some way toward filling this imaginative deficit. “I have been pulled two ways and torn in two all my life,” Frost wrote in a letter of 1915. He was born in 1874 in San Francisco, where his father, William Frost, a newspaperman from primeval New England stock, had taken a job. William Frost died of tuberculosis when Frost was eleven; the family—Frost, his sister Jeanie, and his mother, Isabelle—then made a new start in and around Lawrence, Massachusetts, where Frost’s paternal grandfather oversaw a successful mill.

He tried college twice. First, he went to Dartmouth, where, he said, he lost interest in any task “not self-imposed,” and left after several months. A few years later, having married and started a family, Frost was admitted to Harvard, where he intended to study classics and become a high-school Greek and Latin teacher. He quit after three semesters. He seems to have proposed many times, at least twice successfully, to his future wife, Elinor White. They had exchanged rings in secret before Elinor went off to St. Lawrence University; nearly every time she returned home, it seems, Frost tried to persuade her to drop out. When Frost visited her unannounced, holding a privately printed book of five poems that he had made as a gift for her, she took the book and booted him out. He then set off on a bizarre trip to the Dismal Swamp, in Virginia. He walked ten miles into the swamp and was discovered by some duck hunters. Back home, he visited Elinor, they quarrelled again, he again stormed out, and again suggested that he might do something nuts. In fact, he went to Cambridge to have a drink with friends. Elinor finally graduated, and the two were married.