Frost, even as he explored the crazy kinetics of the London literary scene, knew he was a threshold figure, poised between the comforting, wise poetry of the hoary Gilded Age/Victorian poets and the cutting-edge experimental formalism of the emerging generation of smart, self-styled Modernists. Born within 10 years of Appomattox, Frost grew up studying the techniques, aural effects, and disciplined expression of the public poets of his time—his contemporaries Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Bryant in America and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Matthew Arnold in England. Their sculpted lines, defined by percussive rhythms and accessible rhyme schemes, explored Big Issues (like God, nature, the soul, and friendship) and offered inspirational advice to an emerging middle-class market of lightly educated readers. By temperament, however, Frost was a Modernist. In “Time to Talk,” for instance, the ring of untilled fields creates a disturbingly modern feeling of alienation amidst the otherwise homespun celebration of chit-chat.

Although he was more than 20 years older than the scrappy rebel-poets he first met when he expatriated to England (T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, for instance, were born when Frost was nearly 20), Frost shared their existentialism and serio-comic pessimism over humanity’s chances given the post-apocalyptic feel in the uneasy interregnum between world wars.