The effect of the publication of the Thompson biographical volumes, between 1966 and 1977, was twofold. First and most obviously, it encouraged contemporary literary critics to cast stones at Robert Frost the man in a way that would leave unmendable cracks in “Robert Frost” the legend, at least among the sort of readers who determine the fashionableness of poets. The essence of the criticism of Frost was that he was, in some sense, a fake: an abusive manipulator pretending to be a genial, if mischievous, elder statesman. In reviewing the final Thompson volume for the New York Times Book Review in 1977, for instance, David Bromwich described Frost in this way: “A more hateful human being cannot have lived who wrote words that moved other human beings to tears.” He went on to pronounce the poet a “liar” and “terrifying.” In this estimation, he was following in the footsteps of Helen Vendler, who had declared Frost to be a hypocritical “monster of egotism” who “left behind him a wake of destroyed human lives.” Howard Moss, the poetry editor of The New Yorker, announced that Frost was a “mean-spirited megalomaniac.” In a more nuanced and therefore even more damning piece for the Saturday Review, John W. Aldridge praised Thompson for resisting “the temptation to sensationalize those aspects of Frost’s character that were reprehensible in the extreme,” skipping nimbly over the fact that he had at his disposal only Thompson’s account of “those aspects” in the first place. Claiming that “poetry . . . is an imaginary means of compensating for neurotic difficulty”—and presumably unaware that the biography was constructed around exactly this questionable notion—Aldridge went on to suggest that Frost was tempted “to murder,” that he indulged in “the most abject fawning and flattery” and “exploited his family and friends to a degree that would seem contemptible.” Collectively, these assaults created what Frost’s increasingly embattled defenders called “the monster myth,” a characterization that has proved durable enough to be referenced in the New York Times in January of 2014, more than half a century after the poet’s death: “But now, a new scholarly work [The Letters of Robert Frost] may put an end to the ‘monster myth,’ as Frost scholars call it, once and for all.”