Sometimes seen as the stuff of commencement addresses, his poems are hard to pin down—just like the man behind them.

The vigor of their badness preserves them. Up they float into bad-poem limbo, where their bad lines, loose and weedlike, ...

Trump seeks to emulate JFK’s Camelot. But bending American culture to his will might not be as easy as he thinks.

“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 ...