Barron is associate professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has co-edited Jewish American Poetry (from the University Press of New England) and Roads Not Taken: Rereading Robert Frost (forthcoming from the University of Missouri Press), as well as a forthcoming collection of essays on the poetic movement, New Formalism. Beginning in 2001, he will be the editor in chief of The Robert Frost Review. In the following essay, he shows how "Birches" is really a profound meditation on the meaning of and need for poetic metaphors in everyday life.

Of all the poets in his generation, Robert Frost is the most surprisingly subtle. Compared to such American poets as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens, Frost's poetry seems to be accessible, straightforward, free of learned allusions and difficult language. The subtlety, however, reveals itself whenever readers begin to closely read...