Some Penguin Classics seem particularly to invite the Deluxe treatment, and for a host of reasons good and bad, the poetry of Robert Frost is certainly one of those. This lovely little Deluxe Classic is set to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the publication of Frost’s iconic and poster-friendly poem “The Road Not Taken,” and it sports a typically beautiful design by Alex Merto. The book’s Introduction, as terrifically inviting a 20 pages on Frost as I’ve read in a long time, is by David Orr, the poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review, who makes some very good observations about the two separate versions of Robert Frost – the white-haired avuncular figure writing perfectly nice verses that even have the courtesy to end-rhyme, and the much more complicated artist, “dark, manipulative, and withholding,” as Orr puts it. Orr asks, “Why do we care where the essence of Frost truly resides?” and sketching out an answer:

The answer to this question is complex. But one aspect of it is simple: Frost became a public figure in a way no other American poet has managed, or even come close to managing. His goodwill was courted not just by scholars and other writers but by presidents and senators. He routinely spent the night at Eisenhower’s White House; he was good friends with Stuart Udall, John F. Kennedy’s secretary of the interior; and he was sent to the Soviet Union by Kennedy himself, where he spoke at length and privately with Nikita Khrushchev. (To appreciate how extraordinary this was, try to imagine a contemporary American poet being directed to Russia by President Obama and securing a tete-a-tete with Vladimir Putin.) Readers bought his works in numbers that would today be respectable for a fairly popular novelist, but that for a poet in the first half of the twentieth century were well beyond staggering.

(By reflex now when reading passages like this, I just mentally add in “no other 20th-century American poet,” since that way I’m not constantly irked by people overlooking the extent of Longfellow’s success)

The poems in this volume are taken from A Boy’s Will, North of Boston, and Mountain Interval, and they include “Mending Wall” and, yes, “The Road Not Taken,” but they also include the longer and more complicated verse short stories like “Home Burial,” “The Black Cottage,” “The Housekeeper,” “The Death of the Hired Man” – works that genuinely repay the effort of trying to understand that second, more recondite Frost. Even some of the shortest poems in this collection (which could easily have been three times as long, if it weren’t so clearly aimed at the gift-and-keepsake end of the book-buying spectrum) have tangled roots hidden just under the surface of their homesy scansion, like “The Cow in Apple Time”:

Something inspires the only cow of late

To make no more of a wall than an open gate,

And think no more of wall-builders than fools.

Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools

A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit,

She scorns a pasture withering to root.

She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten

The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.

She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.

She bellows on a knoll against the sky.

Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.

Nobody’s ever going to make a college dormitory poster of that, but then, neither Frost would have cared about such things.