Adam Plunkett awards that honor to Robert Frost, “despite the aspects of his work that children can understand easily”:
His work tends not to challenge us in the ways that we have come to expect from good poetry. His famously intricate forms are often rather easy to spell out, as are his less famous allusions (Romantic poets, Emerson, Shakespeare, Dante, Virgil, Catullus, Plato, Swedenborg, Darwin). His singular achievement in meter – what he called “the sound of sense”—was such an achievement precisely because he could convey a wide range of emotions by sentence sounds alone, even when we haven’t made sense of them. He was no great student of philosophy or history or politics, and most of his abstract ideas, almost all about poetry, are right there in the Collected Prose or the poems.
The challenge, then, is the lack of challenge: that we experience the poems with more depth than we can usually comprehend. In this we are uncannily like the people in his poems walking past forests or down country roads or finding other sights that entrance them, who know that they reflexively project their desires and fears onto what they see even though they can’t help themselves. No matter how false their projections, their experience of them is as real and as intricate as that of what they see (and as that of their own theories and doubts). To read Frost is to feel his characters’ inner conflicts and to feel as conflicted as his characters, who are all too often lost in themselves. So the critic is tasked with the slippery business of tracing her patterns of feeling and thought back to the source without leaving too much of herself or, like most critics, too little.
The Dish 