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 ...

The goodness referred to here was aesthetic rather than moral. What mattered to Frost, at least in this playful letter, wasn’t the state of the universe (“I wouldn’t give a cent to the see ...