While Frost experienced wide popularity in America after his return from England around the time of the First World War, he never fit neatly into the literary categories of the time, eschewing the trappings of Modernism that many fellow poets, like William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and T. S. Eliot espoused. In some ways, Frost’s form aligned more closely with some of the Victorian or Romantic poets of earlier generations, with his liberal use of blank verse and his dedication to natural images. Critic James M. Cox notes, “Though his career fully spans the modern period and though it is impossible to speak of him as anything other than a modern poet […] it is difficult to place him in the main tradition of modern poetry” (“Robert Frost.” Poetry Foundation). Frost utilized the craft elements of the previous generation of writers but put his own spin on them, drawing on more modern notions like Ezra Pound’s imagism, and the use of a colloquial voice to freshen and update the older forms. To explain how he thought about poetry in a 1932 letter to his friend Sydney Cox, Frost wrote: “The objective idea is all I ever cared about. Most of my ideas occur in verse. ... To be too subjective with what an artist has managed to make objective is to come on him presumptuously and render ungraceful what he in pain of his life had faith he had made graceful” (“Robert Frost.” Poetry Foundation), suggesting that the reader should take Frost’s writing at face value and understand the work as separate from its creator.