For years, Jay Parini, the Robert Frost biographer and literature professor, had been writing -- wrestling with, he says -- a book titled ''Why Poetry Matters.'' No sooner was it published than the writer was confronted with a slice-of-life demand to demonstrate his thesis. The criminal justice system in Ripton, Vt., prescribed poetry, of all...

FALL OF FROST By Brian Hall. 340 pp. Viking. $25.95. The life of Robert Frost has been autopsied and re-autopsied so many times that, 45 years since his death, the congeries of appraisals can already be measured in layers, like geologic strata. The early biographies -- beginning with Gorham B. Munson's ''Robert Frost: A Study in Sensibility and...

Imagining that late December night of long darkness, you can almost hear these youths of Vermont tramping up to the isolated farmhouse to intrude upon the sanctuary stillness. The break of snow beneath their feet would be the least of it. They had driven or walked a half-mile up a snow-covered lane called Frost Road, then trudged past a large blue...