What one finds upon reading [Frost's] Collected Poems is a relatively small number of first-rate pieces and a much larger number of unsuccessful ones. I don't mean the failures are "bad poems"; a few are, but scores and scores of them are poems that almost make it—almost but not quite. Usually they contain fine descriptions, pointed imagery, apt and characteristic language; but then at some point they turn talky, insistent, too literal, as if Frost were trying to coerce the meaning from his own poetic materials. And in fact I think this is exactly what he was trying to do. Call it vanity, arrogance, or whatever: Frost came to distrust his own imagination, and believed he could make his poems do and say what he wanted them to do and say. His best poems, nearly all of them from his first two or three books, were poems...