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 ...

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 ...