Sometimes seen as the stuff of commencement addresses, his poems are hard to pin down—just like the man behind them.

Nevertheless, for this poem, and for the first time in his career, Frost got paid—$15, by the editor of a New York weekly called The Independent. “On reading ‘My Butterfly,’ ” Adam Plunkett writes in ...

The poem captures Frost’s sense of being in “bondage” to Kay while she is only “loosely bound” to him. It is, Adam Plunkett writes, in his assiduously close readings of Frost’s poems ...