With the possible exception of Robert Frost, no poet knew the hardships of northern New England as personally as Hayden Carruth did. Whether he was describing the skin-cracking cold, the back-breaking weight of manure or sugar maple's gnarly resistance to the axe, Carruth wrote from firsthand experience. And it was an experience he chose, not one he was born to.

Carruth died Monday at the age of 87 at his home in Munnsville, N.Y. He won acclaim for his poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, but these accolades came late. He also knew poverty and mental illness.

On a wintry day more than a dozen years ago, I drove to Munnsville and spent an afternoon with Carruth. I had read his poetry and prose, admiring especially the poems he wrote while living in Johnson, Vt. As he recounted it that day, his path to Johnson was as surprising and unlikely as the life he made there.

Carruth had been born to a lettered family and had set out to live an urban literary life. Agoraphobia and other acute anxieties upset these intentions. He spent six years in a mental institution - the boobyhatch, he called it, among other things - and was treated with shock therapy and barbiturates. Afterward, he tried to return to the city, but he could not.

He chose Johnson because it was so far north that he could afford the land, which cost $25 an acre. Carruth farmed his 14 acres for two decades beginning in 1961. He worked the potato fields, split wood, fixed tractors and gained his neighbors' esteem as a hard worker. Carruth also lived a second life on his farm. An insomniac, he spent his nights writing poems in a cowshed.

When I met him, his days in northern New England were 17 years behind him, so he spoke of them with a sense of perspective. He had changed his image of himself in Vermont, he said, and the transformation required a reckless disregard for literary convention. In his poetry, he abandoned the cool abstraction of modernism to write as clearly and directly as he could about his inner life and the place and the people he observed.

"I had to say to myself that I'm going to write what I know is honest and true about myself with my own talent, and I don't care if they stand me up against a wall and shoot me," he said during our interview.

Carruth found his voice in Vermont. He even found the courage to enter Frost territory, writing narrative poems in the language he heard around him. In poetry accessible to anyone, he connected a fading agricultural society with a wide audience. Like Frost's, his poetry transcended his region. The voice he found was an American voice.

Carruth's strongest poems borrowed the vernacular of the society he had adopted. This was farmer talk, country talk, and it did not comport with the notion many people had of rural northern New England.

In "The Baler," Carruth addressed these outsiders with a defiant tone:

You tourist composed upon that fence

to watch the quaint farmer at his quaint task

come closer, bring your camera here . . .

These poems bring to life the people Carruth knew. Marshall Washer, the title character of one such poem, was a friend who taught Carruth about farm life, including the truth about manure.

It breaks the farmers' backs. It makes their land.

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