Robert Frost Photo: Popperfoto via Getty Images

I was surprised that, in her review of a new book on Robert Frost, Abigail Deutsch refers to the poet as a “terrifying man” (Books, Feb. 22). That doesn’t track with my own experience.

In my graduating year, 1954-55, Frost sat down with a handful of students at Yale. My impression of him has been a little diamond in my life ever since. In a gentle, relaxed, congenial tone, with warm eye contact, he said, more or less: “You are all probably taking literature classes in which the professors teach how to get behind authors’ words to determine their deeper meanings. In my case, they teach that the crow shaking snow from a hemlock tree means that evil, black, stands in contrast to the pure white good of the snow around it, like in life. They are wrong. I saw the crow, and the tree, and the snow. It was beautiful. I stopped to enjoy it. Period.”