Robert Frost may be the only American poet, and certainly the only great one, who started out as a chicken farmer. T.S. Eliot worked in a bank, Wallace Stevens was an insurance lawyer, and Hart Crane toiled in advertising. William Carlos Williams could write that “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white chickens,” but probably got no closer to the barnyard than his breakfast egg would allow.

For almost 10 years, beginning in 1900, Frost ran a poultry farm in Derry, N.H., and many of his earliest forays into print weren’t in the pages of poetry magazines but in such professional journals as the Eastern Poultryman and Farm-Poultry. Years later, in his collection “A Further Range” of 1936, he could even celebrate a prize-winning pullet, with “her golden leg, her coral comb,” who won a blue ribbon at the Amesbury fair. Improbable as such a beginning may seem, the grueling life of a working farm must have helped to make Frost the hard, gnarled, lapidary poet he became.

All his life, Frost felt “the need of being versed in country things,” as he put it in the title of one of his most beautiful poems. He loved “the fact,” and it was his stubborn allegiance to actual things — birches and fences, a drowsy groundhog and a west-running brook — which gave his verse much of its enduring force. But, as his scattered prose writings show, the things of the world were only the raw stuff, however indispensable, out of which he shaped his poems.

Now, in “The Collected Prose of Robert Frost” (Harvard, 365 pages, $39.95) — published on the 45th anniversary of the poet’s death on January 29, 1963 — Mark Richardson has brought together, in one meticulously edited volume, all the articles, introductions, press releases, and lectures, along with some especially significant letters, which Frost himself readied for print but never saw fit to publish.

Frost’s reluctance to publish is, at first sight, easy to understand. His prose tends to be rough, occasional, and off-the-cuff; it lacks the high polish of his poems. Not only in the transcripts of interviews and recorded talks, but also in the more formal magazine writing, his authorial voice is colloquial, even chatty, and often broken by sudden swerves and hesitations, as though he were discovering what he meant to say in the act of saying it. But, mercifully, it is never “poet’s prose,” packed with knowing allusions and highfalutin turns of phrase. Frost’s startling insights into the poetic process, as well as his frequent jokes, are all the more effective for being bluntly delivered.

Frost’s attention to the homeliest things underlies his deepest insights. When he remarks, in the famous (and previously published) essay “The Figure a Poem Makes” of 1939, that “like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting,” we witness the humdrum made suddenly profound. For Frost, writing poetry was, and had to be, an excursion into surprise. “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader,” was how he put it in the same essay.

Though many of these writings appeared in the superb 1995 Library of America edition of Frost’s poetry and prose, which Mr. Richardson co-edited with Richard Poirier, the new collection offers several previously unknown, and fascinating, documents. One such is Frost’s essay, probably written in 1941, on “The Last Refinement of Subject Matter: Vocal Imagination,” recovered from a handwritten draft held in the Dartmouth College Library. Here, Frost elaborates on his celebrated notion of “the sound of sense,” that innate recognition of meaningful patterns in all human speech that sustains genuine poetic expression. In his discussion of the “tones of meaning,” which shape both conversation and lines of verse, Frost advises poets to cultivate “observing ears.” A poem must be made out of vowels and consonants, it must draw on the actual things of the world, but only an ear for the right intonations of speech will make it memorable. Ever down to earth, Frost illustrates this principle by listing the varied ways in which we pronounce the word “no” — the angry, the contemptuous, and the lenient, among others. The meaning of our little negative particle shifts drastically with each tone. A good line of verse carries its meanings in just such elusive but instinctive tones.

Mr. Richardson modestly describes this new collection as supplemental to his Library of America edition. In fact, it provides much more. His extensive notes offer a wealth of information, often drawn from unpublished sources, which wonderfully illuminate Frost’s intentions. His poems, like that prize pullet, still stand in all their brilliant “fluff of plumage,” but the prose lays bare “the lowly pen” from which they sprang.

eormsby@nysun.com