The Notebooks of Robert Frost were published three years ago to rapturous approval. Frost is still an American icon and an American nonesuch, the last major poet to find a public audience—his poems say more about the American character than any poet’s after Whitman. Though Frost’s America seems distant almost a century after the publication of North of Boston, he remains the most quoted American modern. The notebooks gave a rare look inside his workshop, showing the painstaking and sometimes clumsy way his poems, essays, and talks were put together. Reviewers for newspapers and magazines, working to short deadlines, usually trust the labors of scholars. Still, it was hazardous for the New Republic to call the book “expertly edited and annotated” without apparently checking the editing or annotation, or the TLS to declare the editing (apart from one minor cavil) a “superb job” and a “labour of love,” saying that “anyone who dips into them has reason to be grateful to their editor.”

Late in 2007, a review by James Sitar in Essays in Criticism accused Robert Faggen, that very editor, of making monstrous errors of transcription, some so embarrassing they made him—or Frost—look like an idiot. A few months later, after six months in press, my own review in Parnassuscondemned the edition in similar terms. Both pieces claimed that Faggen, though in many places a canny reader of Frost’s diabolic hand, had offered hardly a page that did not need revision. The errors ran