Bad poems never die, never really go away: The vigor of their badness preserves them. Up they float into bad-poem limbo, where their bad lines, loose and weedlike, drift and coil and tangle with one another eternally. Robert Frost, who turned 20 in 1894, uncertain of his gift, bouncing among stray gigs (actor's manager, repairer of lights at a wool mill) in Lawrence, Massachusetts, had written a poem called "My Butterfly." It begins like this: "Thine emulous fond flowers are dead too, / And the daft sunassaulter, he/ That frighted thee so oft..." It is what it is, a bad poem. A randomfeeling extrusion of lyrical matter, like something that might come out of the tube when you pull the lever marked POETRY.

Nevertheless, for this poem, and for the first time in his career, Frost got paid-$15, by the editor of a New York weekly called The Independent. "On reading 'My Butterfly,"" Adam Plunkett writes in his new Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost's Poetry, "the poetry editor called the rest of the staff over to listen because she had just discovered a poet." A woman whose literary perspicacity exceeded my own, clearly. I would have left him to molder in the slush pile.