In 1978, Donald Hall published, to much acclaim, a book called Remembering Poets, memoirs of Dylan Thomas, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Frost. (The book also reprinted, in an appendix, interviews Hall had conducted with Eliot and Pound for The Paris Review.) Hall did not have much to go on: he had met Pound in the course of a few days in Rome in 1960 during his interview assignment, and Eliot a few times in Cambridge in the early 1950s, twice at Eliot’s London office a few years later, and then in New York in 1959, on the occasion of the interview. Thomas and Frost, too, Hall had met only occasionally over the years. Hall’s lack of intimacy with his poets, which might have daunted another writer, turned out to be a boon. Free from the facts that sometimes encumber biographers, Hall instead relied on his own powers of speculation and general shrewdness about poets and the poetic life. This can be seen on every page of Remembering Poets but especially in Hall’s account of Frost’s dismissal of a student’s weakly imitative poem at a writing conference that the sixteen-year-old Hall attended in 1945. (Frost said that Eliot, not the student, had written the poem.) Rather than use the episode to further the myth of Frost as an unspeakable ogre, as his official biographer, the philistine Lawrance Thompson, would have done, Hall argues that Frost’s competitiveness—he wished the student had imitated him, not Eliot—provoked