mask to become something he would like to be: "To a large degree the speaker in his poetry is a deliberate alter ego, the kindly, calm person Frost would have liked to be but knew all too well that he was not" (p. 1082).
An important element in Frost's life that is reflected in his poetry is his love for New England, yet it is inherent in the work itself. The reader need not know that Frost was not born in New England and that his family only moved there when he was eleven years old. The way the poet's persona meditates on New England and the nature of that area and does so with a certain melancholy may reflect the poet's actual feelings and some of the vicissitudes of his life, but the meaning is clear without any knowledge of the poet's life because Frost is an excellent communicator of what he wants the reader to see. It can deepen the reader's understanding to know where these feelings developed in the life of the poet, but the poems themselves have to be fashioned to convey meaning without recourse to a biography.
Frost describes aspects of rural New England in "The Pasture," "Mowing," "After Apple-Picking," and in other poems. The bleak element is evident in the spare language which expresses simple actions in a direct way that seems to evoke a certain loneliness and isolation. in "The Pasture," the poet repeats the line: "I sha'n't be gone long.--You come too" (lines 4, 8). The persona has a job to do and asks the listener to come along. The poet shows a concern with death that is evident in "The Death of the Hired Man" and "Home Burial," as examples, and perhaps the specific attitudes he takes derive from his personal experience, such as the death of his son. The emotion and the meaning are conveyed whether the reader knows about Frost's personal grief or not. By reading the poem, the reader indeed knows that the poet has experienced this grief in some way. Knowledge of Frost's life adds to our understanding of t...