Frost's most famous poem is misread as a celebration of American nonconformists, writes SU professor. To true nonconformists, it would have evoked the era's racial violence.

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 ...