If there is any truth to Emerson's aphorism “to be great is to be misunderstood,” then Robert Frost is surely one of the greatest poets. In a century in which some of the most celebrated literature seemed to follow Emerson in reverse - “to be misunderstood (or incomprehensible) is to be great” - Robert Frost's seductively limpid lines were taken as evidence of the author's simplicity or, worse, simplemindedness. Frost's popularity, as well as his willingness in his later years to perform as a hoary public sage, left many among the academically sophisticated suspicious. His adherence to ancient literary traditions and his disdain of political radicalism angered those with more revolutionary temperaments. A reviewer, commenting in The New Yorker on his Collected Poems of 1930, proclaimed that his “popularity can be put down to the fact that he always expressed with imaginative sincerity, American nostalgia for a lately abandoned rural background,” and that he was a bard “always occupied with the complicated task of simply being sincere.”