A Life

By Jay Parini

Illustrated. 514 pages. Henry Holt & Company. $35.

Why yet another biography of Robert Frost (1874-1963), when more than a dozen lives of the poet have already been published, among them Lawrance Thompson's three-volume official biography, ''Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874-1915,'' ''Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938'' and ''Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938-1963,'' the latter written with R. H. Winnick?

Jay Parini -- a poet, novelist and biographer who teaches English at Middlebury College -- addresses this question in an afterword, ''Frost and His Biographers,'' to his graceful ''Robert Frost: A Life.'' Here he argues that to date Frost biographies have been defined by three phases. The first began with a view of Frost as a man of good sense and eventually culminated in a caricature of Frost as the ''farmer-poet offering homespun wisdom from the lecture platform.''

The corrective to this view was provided by Thompson's monumental biography. But for all the valuable detail it offered, it presented Frost as a monster and misanthrope; in Mr. Parini's words, ''a selfish, egomaniacal, dour, cruel and angry man.'' This negative portrait prevailed until the third phase, when the focus of various Frost studies shifted to his poetry, and, as a result, a more complex and contradictory view of the man began to emerge. A throwback to phase two, in Mr. Parini's view, was Jeffrey Meyers's ''Robert Frost: A Biography'' (1996), which, he argues convincingly, was a compendium of sensationalist misinformation and a grotesque misreading of Frost's work.

The problem, Mr. Parini reasons, is that biography is too often misconstrued as mere facts, whereas what someone writing a life must discover is the story, or ''mythos,'' composed by the facts. Thompson's life was driven by a distorting mythos, Mr. Parini argues. His own hope is to find in the facts ''a fresh mythos.'' His intention is ''not to supplant or overtake previous biographers and critics but merely to add a significant layer.''

So the raw material of this biography is not new but freshly culled and arranged and told with emphasis on both the life and the poetry. Mr. Parini hesitates to say that Frost suffered from bipolar disorder; ''one cannot, retrospectively, make such a diagnosis,'' he writes. But depression always threatened, made worse by the troubles of his children, to whom he was not as bad a father as previous biographers have insisted.

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Fighting off the depression, Frost moved in two directions, Mr. Parini writes. He plunged deeply into nature, which he saw as a metaphor for the spirit, but more concretely than Emerson, so that when he was a climber of his birches, his objective was not to reach the sky but to be grounded like Antaeus. Yet his aim was never to merge with the nature he wrote about in his poems, but rather to find ''portent in little,'' as he put it in the poem ''Design.''

''It is intriguing to consider how many of Frost's best poems reflect on the act of creation,'' Mr. Parini writes, ''the process of breaking down the forms of reality given by the world and remaking them, restoring them to freshness.'' He illustrates this point at length in his analyses of poems like ''Birches,'' ''Mending Wall,'' ''After Apple-Picking,'' ''The Ax-Helve'' and many others.

At the same time, Mr. Parini argues, Frost's fear of depression and loneliness drove him out onto the public stage. Here, as a teacher, lecturer and ''sayer'' of his poems, he evolved an image that although at odds with the subtlety of his writing, served both to create an audience for poetry readings and to define the role of the college writer in residence.

''Robert Frost: A Life'' is a pleasure to read, combining as it does penetrating commentary on the poetry and good illustrative anecdotes. There is, for example, the story of Frost's first meeting with Pound, who upon starting to read a copy of Frost's first book, ''A Boy's Will,'' said, ''You don't mind our liking this, do you?'' To which Frost replied, ''Oh, no, go right ahead.''

Admittedly, Mr. Parini is not entirely persuasive in his more benign view of Frost. Only if you believe that children are shaped exclusively by heredity can you accept that mere extreme ''bad luck'' accounts for why two of his daughters suffered mental breakdowns while his son ended up committing suicide. While instability ran in his family, Frost cannot have been easy to grow up with.

Yet the story Mr. Parini tells is more than palatable. Particularly satisfying are his analyses of Frost's craft as a poet, especially why Frost said that ignoring the formal rules of verse would be like playing tennis with the net down. What made Frost unique was not merely the vernacular sound of his voice, or what he himself called his striving after ''the sounds of sense.'' In an analysis of lines from the poem ''Mowing,'' Mr. Parini shows how Frost's vernacular creates a tension with the underlying iambic pentameter.

He writes: ''The poetry, in Frost as in most good poets, occurs in the difference between the abstract possibility of the line and its vernacular performance, where stresses fall as they do normally in human speech.'' He concludes: ''Without that slight tug toward the formally perfect line, however remote, there would be no poetry. The form, indeed, makes the poetry possible.''

This tug between the formal and the vernacular is only one of the many contradictions that make Mr. Parini's version of Frost so intriguing.

As he concludes: ''He was a loner who liked company; a poet of isolation who sought a mass audience; a rebel who sought to fit in. Although a family man to the core, he frequently felt alienated from his wife and children and withdrew into reveries. While preferring to stay at home, he traveled more than any poet of his generation to give lectures and readings, even though he remained terrified of public speaking to the end. . . . In a sense, Frost made himself a representative American by amplifying his individuality, by finding a voice for Everyman in the persona of the Lone Striker. By making himself eccentric, he found the center.''

By making Frost more complex and contradictory than his previous biographers have, Mr. Parini has brought him more sharply into focus.

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