I began life wanting perfection and determined to have it. I got so I ceased to expect it and could do without it. Now I find I actually crave the flaws of human handiwork. I gloat over imperfection. Look out for me. You as critic and psychoanalyst will know how to do that. Nevertheless I’m telling you something in a self conscious moment that may throw light on every page of my writing for what it is worth. I mean I am a bad bad man. But yours—R.F.

FROST TO BERNARD DEVOTO, October 20, 1938

To be perfectly frank with you I am one of the most notable craftsmen of my time. That will transpire presently.

FROST TO JOHN T. BARTLETT, July 4, 1913

Before Robert Lee Frost was “Robert Frost,” he was nobody. This is true of most major poets, in a sense. The reputation-building machinery of the poetry world is buried so deep in the trundling ocean of American culture as to be nearly invisible (and was similarly submerged even in Frost’s day), so the larger reading public only rarely becomes accustomed to poets over a long, open, evaluative process. Rather, a poet who acquires any national reputation often seems to have appeared out of nowhere and all at once, like a whale breaching, as a thousand unseen currents come together. We choose our actors and popular musicians; we are presented with our poets.

But if a major poet’s early career usually goes unremarked in the broader culture, his ambitions are rarely unknown among other poets and the people who read them. By the time he was thirty, T. S. Eliot had consorted with Alain-Fournier, been lectured to by Henri Bergson, befriended Conrad Aiken, allied himself with Ezra Pound, and become a project for Wyndham Lewis. By the time he was thirty-five, he was the controversial author of The Waste Land, an affiliate of the Bloomsbury group, and the editor of The Egoist, arguably the most significant literary periodical of the modernist era. (It published parts of Ulysses, among many other credits.) The average reader in 1923 would have had no idea who Eliot was, but the un-average reader—the elite reader—was another story.