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 sun-assaulter, he / That frighted thee so oft …” It is what it is, a bad poem. A random-feeling 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.

Plunkett, whose book offers close readings of the poems as well as the life, quite likes “My Butterfly.” For him, it “reads like a spell that conjures the experience of grace.” Frost himself thought enough of the poem to include it, 19 years later, in his first collection, A Boy’s Will—where it acts as a kind of remedial concentrate, strengthening the poems around it with homeopathic doses of its own badness. “To the Thawing Wind,” for example, opens with three lines of sub-Shelleyan puff: “Come with rain, O loud Southwester! / Bring the singer, bring the nester; / Give the buried flower a dream …” (Flowers again.) But the fourth line—“Make the settled snow-bank steam”—that’s Frost. You can see the steam rising, hear it hiss across those sibilants. And the next line is better still, blunter, Frostier, more concrete even as it hums with the voltage of symbol: “Find the brown beneath the white.” The growth beneath the crust of death.

Through his poetry, with his poetry, Frost thought about symbols a lot. Were things as they merely appeared, or were they representative of something else, some higher or lower order of being? Was the world made of matter saturated in spirit, or the other way around, or neither? “God’s own descent / Into flesh was meant / As a demonstration / That the supreme merit / Lay in risking spirit / In substantiation,” he declared in 1962’s “Kitty Hawk,” writing in the philosophical doggerel of his late manner.

Many of his poems turn on the problem of having a mind—of simply being conscious, observant, in our weird human way, while existence churns through us and beyond us. Of coming upon an abandoned woodpile in the middle of winter, a thing of utter dereliction, and being unable not to invest it with some kind of personality, watching it “warm the frozen swamp as best it could / With the slow smokeless burning of decay.”

Shortly after writing “My Butterfly,” Frost had a bit of a blowout with his girlfriend. He’d just dropped out of Dartmouth; she wasn’t ready to drop out of St. Lawrence. Did she even want to marry him? Plunkett suggests that he’d been “generally making a pain of himself in the role of jealous lover.” Badly upset, and in a state of screw-it-all young-man desperation, Frost packed his bag, left Lawrence (“without even a note to his mother,” tuts Jay Parini in his Robert Frost: A Life, from 1999), and headed for the Great Dismal Swamp—which sounds allegorical but is a real location, a forbidding stretch of wetland on the Virginia–North Carolina border.

[From the June 1951 issue: Robert Frost’s America]

Frost seems to have never been to the Great Dismal Swamp, to have had no connection to it at all. I’m speculating, but surely his only possible reason for going there was literary: the Bunyanesque name of the place (“Being the creature of literature I am,” as he would later write in “New Hampshire”). He was on his own Pilgrim’s Progress, his own symbolic quest, and he wanted to pass through his own Slough of Despond.

By train and by ship, he got himself in there—into the doom-bogs, into the fen of misery, and he did some lonely wandering. Then he came back out. He took a steamer, hooked up with a party of drunken duck hunters, hopped a freight train, got robbed by the brakeman, stayed in a hobos’ camp, made it to Baltimore, wired home for cash. It’s a great burlesque episode. Someone should write a little book, Frost in the Swamp. Plunkett rather rattles through it; Parini takes it slower, noting that a chunk of Frost’s poetic psyche was forged on this trip, down there in the great dismalia, among the mulchy ground and the dark trees: “If Frost can be said to have an archetypal poem, it is one in which the poet sets off, forlorn or despairing, into the wilderness, where he will either lose his soul or find that gnostic spark of revelation.”

“The Road Not Taken,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”—these aren’t really poems anymore. Decades of mass exposure have done something to them, inverted their aura. Now they’re more like … recipes. Or in-flight safety announcements.

[From the August 1915 issue: Robert Frost’s “Birches,” “The Road Not Taken,” and “The Sound of Trees”]

Not really Frost’s fault, of course. But then again, he did love being famous. He embraced being famous. After so many years of hidden toil, scratching out a living through his 20s and 30s as a teacher and poultry farmer in Derry, New Hampshire, he adored—who wouldn’t?—his huge, unpoetic popularity when it finally arrived. And it wasn’t just the general reader, the middlebrow poetry lover—he had the respect of the bigwigs, too. Four Pulitzer Prizes (1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943), a pileup of other honors and sinecures. To John F. Kennedy he was Mr. Rabbit Frawst; the president-elect invited him to read at his inauguration, where Frost fumbled over his prepared text before reciting “The Gift Outright” from memory: “The land was ours before we were the land’s …”

The interesting comparison, fame-wise, is with Dylan Thomas, who in early-’50s America went off like a rocket while Frost was steadily expanding his audience. But Thomas was fragile and buzzing and not long for this world; Frost was solidifying. He would become an institution.

[From the February 1964 issue: John F. Kennedy’s eulogy for Robert Frost]

And yet I found it strangely easy to avoid him. To go right around him. For a long time there was a perfectly Frost-shaped hole in my understanding of American poetry. And it wasn’t a problem, because there’s something hermetic about his legacy: Frost sits alone, sealed, seeming to touch or connect with none of the poets around him. He did live, to a greater degree than most poets, in his own atmosphere, but it’s more than that. “What does it mean?” is always the wrong question in poetry. A poem is what it does, the effect it has, not what it narrowly and explicably means. And yet with Frost somehow—equivocal, enigmatic, withholding, hide-and-seek Frost, the Frost of “Mowing” and “Birches” and “Mending Wall,” rustic-inscrutable (or affecting to be), full of dark hints, so plainspoken and so tricky—this is the question you keep helplessly asking: What’s he on about here?

Take, for instance, the famous penultimate line of 1913’s “Mowing”: “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” It’s pregnant-feeling, aphoristic, winking away with compressed significance. But I don’t know what it means. Do you? Frost, the old gnome, once told an audience, “There’s one of the keys to all my life [and] thinking in one line.” Plunkett is all in; he calls this line “a creed,” adding that it “set a standard for the rest of Frost’s poetry.” But his explanations of it don’t really help me: “The creed declares that the richest aesthetic experience of imagination, the sweetest dream, is to be had by using the power of imagination to contemplate the world at hand.” Or again:

Of the creed’s manifold meaning, the double meaning most fundamental is of realist and idealist visions of knowledge, the fact as the sweetest dream that labor knows or the fact as the sweetest dream that labor knows, as if the facts of the world, like dreams, were knowable through imagination.

Perhaps I’m being obtuse. Or perhaps the necessity of any explanation at all has already short-circuited my intellect.

So I go back to the great poems, the undeniable, straightforwardly mysterious, no-explaining-required, knock-you-on-your-ass poems. The glittering miniatures (“Fire and Ice,” “Dust of Snow”), the mighty midrangers (“An Old Man’s Winter Night”), the great statements (“Desert Places”), and the shaggier, madder excursions into monologue and dialogue, his special brand of agitated farmhouse talk: “A Servant to Servants,” “The Witch of Coös.” (“Mother can make a common table rear / And kick with two legs like an army mule.”)

[From the August 1915 issue: Robert Frost, a new American poet]

Between A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston a year later, something happened: The Muses tapped him, lightning struck, poetry broke upon him in a big way. What had happened, actually, was that he had crossed the Atlantic—upped sticks, with his family, in 1912, and decamped to England for three years. A solid career move. In prewar London he met Yeats and Pound, and the extraordinary poet-critic T. E. Hulme. He hung around with lesser Georgians like Wilfrid Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie. He bonded profoundly with Edward Thomas. He had arrived, in other words, at just the moment when—and just the place where—poetry’s ancien régime was about to be dynamited by modernism.

The change was under way in his own poetry. In his creaky, earthy Robert Frost style, he was ushering in something just as shock-of-the-new as anything the modernists would produce. The drunkard on the bed in “A Hundred Collars”: “Naked above the waist, / He sat there creased and shining in the light, / Fumbling the buttons in a well-starched shirt.” It has the too-real physical exactitude of the later war poets, of Wilfred Owen or Robert Graves—but the war hadn’t happened yet. The working title for North of Boston was Farm Servants and Other People, and in its spooked, unreliable rural scenes, Frost had only one true peer at the time, the English poet Charlotte Mew. Her “The Farmer’s Bride” was published in The Nation in 1912: “When us was wed she turned afraid / Of love and me and all things human; / Like the shut of a winter’s day. / Her smile went out.”

North of Boston was Frost coming into his birthright as a poet. No more strained lyricisms, fewer flowers. “I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight”: Now that—from “After Apple-Picking”—that’s a creed, that’s a motto for a poet. The confessional throb of the line seems to place it right between Wordsworth’s “I cannot paint what then I was” and Robert Lowell’s “My mind’s not right.” Listen, indeed, to the 1951 recording of Frost reading “After Apple-Picking” and you’ll realize how close you are in this 1914 poem to Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” 44 years later, how you’re shivering on the same visionary frequency and hearing the same chanted, haunted cadence. Both poems take place in the hallucination chamber of a New England autumn. Frost’s narrator is being dragged into a death-doze by the scent of freshly picked apples, caught between his body and his dreaming mind, his instep still sore from all the hours spent up a ladder even as he goes into a trance: “Magnified apples appear and disappear”—the plumpness in that double-p sound, hypnotically renewed—“Stem end and blossom end, / And every fleck of russet showing clear.” It’s like a YouTube ad for apples, endlessly rolling, evilly glistening apples, a sumptuous close-up for which the technology did not yet exist.

Frost was a complicated fellow, not always using his powers for good. By the end of Love and Need, you’re glad to escape his company. He certainly had his trials—the death of his wife, the suicide of his son—but somehow more depressing is Plunkett’s portrait of the strange and stifling coterie around him in the latter years, the grand-old-man years, when he was playing one would-be biographer against another and maintaining a kind of zombie love triangle with his manager-secretary and her unfortunate husband, all while reaping large amounts of the especially bland worldly acclaim you get when you’re already acclaimed.

The work, all the way through, was crazily uneven. A Witness Tree (for which, naturally, he won another Pulitzer, in 1943) contains the sonnet “The Silken Tent,” which Plunkett regards as a masterpiece and I regard as a card-carrying bad poem. From the first line, “She is as in a field a silken tent,” that slithery is/as/in—we feel the ickiness of the whole creepily extended woman-as-tent conceit. But turn a few pages and you find “The Most of It,” which begins like this:

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.

Here we are: modernity. The current condition. This is the trapped subject, the voice crying out in the wilderness, seeking a response from the Everything but getting only the scornful bounce-back of itself.

But then we shift. The cliff across the lake, it turns out, is not a metaphor, or not just a metaphor. It’s an actual (if phantasmagoric) place. It’s like the Great Dismal Swamp: It exists and it super-exists. And now something, or some thing—an “embodiment” (brilliant, terrifying word)—noisily enters the water on the far side of the lake. Splash, and here it comes, paddling toward us—the universe’s reply. And the embodiment, the apprehended sound, that report of something unseen and solid crashing into the lake, now takes a form: “As a great buck it powerfully appeared, / Pushing the crumpled water up ahead.”

[Read: Robert Frost’s poems and essays in The Atlantic]

So Frostian: right between reality (“crumpled”) and otherness. The word antlers is not in the poem, but somehow you see them, the great rearing trees of bone. This buck is a monster—wordless energy, wordless strength—and with its snorting and triumphantly chaotic arrival on the shore, it brings the Message, which is no Message, from the far side. The meaning is there is no meaning. It “landed pouring like a waterfall, / And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, / And forced the underbrush—and that was all.”

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “When Robert Frost Was Bad.”

Donald Trump campaigned, in part, on returning political power to American Christians. “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before,” Trump promised a room full of religious news broadcasters in February 2024. “With your help and God’s grace, the great revival of America begins on November 5.” At different campaign events, he vowed both that Christian leaders would have a line “directly into the Oval Office—and me” and that he would create a federal task force to “stop the weaponization of our government against Christians.” Now, not even three weeks into his new term, he has begun down quite the opposite path.

Among the Trump administration’s first efforts were orders that delivered a stunning blow to humanitarian organizations, including the suspension of foreign aid pending review, the halting of refugee-resettlement programs, the dismantling of USAID, and the freezing of all federal grants that normally flow to nonprofit organizations such as Catholic Charities USA, the official domestic relief agency of the Catholic Church. Catholic Charities represents a network of 168 local groups nationwide offering disaster assistance, meals, and housing for people in need, and refugee services and programs for migrants. According to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the freeze was part of a broader effort to root out “wokeness,” though it’s difficult to match that descriptor to this particular organization. And although the freeze on federal grants and loans was paused two days after Trump signed the order, many organizations are still unable to access funds.

[Read: You can’t just unpause USAID]

Late last month, hundreds of leaders from Catholic relief and aid organizations met for the annual Catholic Social Ministry Gathering in Washington, D.C. What ensued was “a scene of real panic,” Stephen Schneck, the chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, told me. “They were in shock, and they were disturbed, and they were feeling really panicky about the situation and wondering what to do.” Schneck recalled speaking with an attendee from El Paso, Texas, who was suddenly unable to buy diapers for babies in his charity’s care. “And this happened with no warning, no extensions,” Schneck said. “It just happened overnight.” Catholic agencies providing relief overseas were also affected by the freeze on foreign aid, which came with a stop-work order that suspended operations.

Along with the shutdown of federal funding for so many Catholic charitable organizations, Trump also revoked a Joe Biden–era policy that prevented Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from apprehending people in or near “sensitive locations” such as churches and schools. The change elicited a statement from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which registered its dismay at the transformation of places for “care, healing, and solace into places of fear and uncertainty for those in need,” and called for “a better path forward that protects the dignity of all those we serve, upholds the sacred duty of our providers, and ensures our borders and immigration system are governed with mercy and justice.”

The statement set off a back-and-forth between the bishops and Vice President J. D. Vance, who responded to the bishops on Face the Nation late last month, saying that “the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” The USCCB followed up with another statement, saying that “faithful to the teaching of Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church has a long history of serving refugees … In our agreements with the government, the USCCB receives funds to do this work; however, these funds are not sufficient to cover the entire cost of these programs. Nonetheless, this remains a work of mercy and ministry of the Church.”

[Read: Bishop Budde delivered a truly Christian message]

Vance, speaking with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, provided further Catholic reasoning for his administration’s approach to migrants and refugees, arguing that he thinks it’s “a very Christian concept that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world”—a statement to which the bishops have not responded. If they did, however, I imagine they would point out that Jesus addresses this matter in his Sermon on the Mount, saying, “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The Christian mandate is more arduous than Vance’s account seems to allow.

Catholic politicians disputing the bishops’ witness to the faith is nothing new, though the allegations of avarice and corruption are somewhat surprising, and presage bitter conflict ahead. Perhaps that could be helpful, insofar as it would sharply distinguish the teaching of the Church from certain politicized versions of Catholicism tailored to the ideological preferences of their confessors. The Church is called to be a sign of contradiction—a bulwark of Christian priorities against the demands of the political and cultural eras that the faithful pass through. Comporting with political and cultural demands is what politicians do; the degree to which Catholic politicians do the same is the degree to which they ought to suspect themselves spiritually compromised. Perhaps they all are, and perhaps so are we.

In fact, the tendency of humankind to be self-serving and deceitful is part of what makes me believe that Christianity is at its purest and most beautiful when it is counterintuitive and unwieldy—that is, when it is least amenable to human convenience. The command to love even those who aren’t your kith and kin is an excellent example of just that. The command to serve the weakest and most outcast members of society is another. Thus, the decision to love and serve the stranger, the refugee, and the foreigner with charity is a hallmark of the Christian faith, such that a government crackdown on this work seems to be a threat to Christian practice itself, or an attempt to reshape it into something else altogether.

Updated at 11:11 a.m. ET on January 13, 2025

In 1900, a former schoolteacher named Carrie Nation walked into a bar in Kiowa, Kansas, proclaimed, “Men, I have come to save you from a drunkard’s fate,” and proceeded to hurl bricks and stones at bottles of liquor. The men, interested less in spiritual salvation and more in physical safety, fled to a corner. Nation destroyed three saloons that day, using a billiard ball when she ran out of bricks and rocks, which she called “smashers.” She eventually—and famously—switched to a hatchet, using it across years of attacks on what she considered to be the cause of society’s moral failings. She referred to this period of her life as one of “hatchetation.”

By comparison, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, an internist of mild disposition perhaps best known for raising alarm about the “loneliness epidemic,” has taken a gentler approach to the obstinate challenge of alcohol. His recent call to add cancer warnings to alcoholic products was made without violence or yelling. But the recommendation, if followed, would be the most significant action taken against alcohol since at least the 1980s, when new laws set the national drinking age at 21 and mandated warning labels concerning, among other things, alcohol’s pregnancy-related risks. Murthy’s proposal is part of ever-grimmer messaging from public-health officials about even moderate drinking, and comes during a notable shift in cultural attitudes toward alcohol, especially among “sober-curious” young people. In 2020, my colleague Olga Khazan asked why no one seemed interested in creating a modern temperance movement. Now that movement has arrived with a distinctly 21st-century twist. Carrie Nation was trying to transform the soul of her country. Today’s temperance is focused on the transformation of self.

The movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries—which eventually brought about Prohibition—went hand in hand with broad religious revivalism and the campaign for women’s rights. It considered alcohol to be unhealthy for women, families, and the general state of humanity. The depth of the problem posed by alcohol in pre-Prohibition America is hard to fathom: In 1830, Americans drank three times the amount of spirits that we do today, the equivalent of 90 bottles of 80-proof booze a year. As distilled liquor became widely available, men were wasting most of their wages on alcohol and staying out all night at saloons, and what we now call domestic abuse was rampant, the food historian Sarah Wassberg Johnson told me. Members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union saw themselves as a progressive group helping the disadvantaged. “They were protecting the home, protecting the family, and protecting the nation by getting rid of alcohol,” Dan Malleck, a health and sciences professor at Brock University, told me. In the latter half of the 19th century, young people signaled their moral virtue by taking temperance pledges.

Today’s sober-curious, by contrast, post on Instagram about how Dry January has reduced their inflammation, sharpened their jawline, and improved their sleep score. The sanctity of the home, or the overall moral health of society—not to mention the 37 Americans who die in drunk-driving crashes every day—appears to be less of a concern. (To be fair, this focus on health is partially a response to research on moderate alcohol consumption’s detrimental effects on heart health, cancer risk, and lifespan.) In a 2020 Gallup poll, 86 percent of respondents said that drinking alcohol was morally acceptable, an increase from 78 percent in 2018. By contrast, more than half of young adults surveyed in 2023 expressed concerns about the health risks of moderate drinking.

[From the July/August 2021 issue: America has a drinking problem]

Colleen Myles, a professor at Texas State University who studies how alcoholic drinks change cultures, told me that such responses don’t mean that the national conversation about alcohol has abandoned morality—simply that Americans’ ethical center of gravity has drifted. She considers modern teetotaling to be steered by a great moral project of our age: self-optimization. In her book Sober Curious, Ruby Warrington wrote that lower alcohol intake “is the next logical step in the wellness revolution.” Myles said that choosing not to drink in an alcohol-soaked culture is seen as an act of authenticity or self-care; social change, but enacted through the individual. In 2019, a nonalcoholic-spirit producer, who calls her product a “euphoric” instead of a mocktail, almost echoed Carrie Nation when she told The New York Times, “Alcohol is a women’s lib issue, an LGBTTQQIAAP issue, a race issue.” But her vision of temperance was much less socially minded: Sober-curiosity, she said, was about a person’s “freedom to choose.” One can hardly imagine Congress or a radical activist like Nation attempting to restrict that freedom by outlawing the sale of espresso martinis. The proposed warning label, however, with its nod to individual health (and absence of radical social action), is more fitting for our age of wellness. It won’t cure society of all its ills, but it at least has a shot of persuading some people to tone down their drinking.

The original temperance movement’s end result—Prohibition—was more ambitious, and took place at the societal level. Prohibition didn’t make the personal act of drinking illegal, but rather the sale, purchase, and transport of alcohol. After Congress proposed the Eighteenth Amendment in 1917, it allowed seven years for the measure to pass; thanks to widespread enthusiasm, the states ratified it in only 13 months. The amendment and the Volstead Act, the law that enforced it, passed in 1919, and Prohibition officially kicked off in 1920.

In this century, “I don’t think we’re going to have Prohibition again,” Myles said, not least because the sober-curious are not advocating for policy change at this scale. Instead, neo-temperates are shifting social and, yes, moral norms about alcohol by emphasizing its effects on health. They also, crucially, are creating markets for nonalcoholic drinks and spaces. The original temperance movement similarly popularized a number of new beverages, such as sodas and fruit juices. But unlike the modern version, it directly attacked the alcoholic-beverage industry. In 1916, the United States was home to 1,300 breweries that made full-strength beer; 10 years later, they were all gone.

[From the April 1921 issue: Relative values in Prohibition]

Alcohol consumption, and the deaths associated with it, decreased significantly during Prohibition. But many people continued to buy alcohol illegally or make it themselves. Part of the reason the temperance movement didn’t usher in utopia, Malleck said, is that it failed to recognize how drunkenness could be fueled by still other societal problems, such as low wages or 12-hour workdays in factories where you were liable to lose a limb or have to urinate in a corner. These issues persisted even when alcohol was outlawed. In 1933, during the Great Depression, legislators decided the country needed the economic boost from alcohol sales and repealed Prohibition. President Herbert Hoover called Prohibition a noble experiment, but many historians consider it a failure. Today, about 60 percent of Americans drink, and that figure has held steady for more than four decades.

And yet, over the past several years, signs have appeared that fewer young people are drinking. If bricks and hatchets couldn’t convince Americans to transform their relationship to alcohol, perhaps the promise of finding your best self through phony negronis and nonalcoholic IPAs will.

This article originally misstated Colleen Myles’s title and the name of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.