Robert Frost was America's leading pastoral poet. He demonstrated in his verse that nature is man's most revealing mirror--and the clearest window into human personality. That conviction led him to explore the darkest forces of both nature and humanity. Some readers, comparing him to modernists like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, consider Frost a traditional poet. Others regard his work as complex and multilayered, wholly new in its own way. Frost himself evaded the question with characteristic understatement: "I am [not] un-designing," he said.