Mike Snider writes "He [Frost] didn't write as if modernism didn't exist; he knew it was mistaken." But my original point was that Frost made it possible for others to treat modernism as though it were a mistake, or didn't really count (exist). I was thinking in particular of the Hall Pack Simpson anthology, which I believe had an introduction written by Robert Frost. The idea was an academic poetry written in the shadow of modernism, but emphasizing only the conservative dimension of modernism. David Antin has written about this of course.

Now a poet like Anthony Hecht emerges from a tradition that includes modernist poetry (Marianne Moore; Eliot) and second-generation modernists (Auden). I don't think he would come up with a simplistic statement like "modernism was mistaken." The statement about Hardy that I made was similar in intention: I think it was Philip Larkin who led a "return to Hardy" movement.

If you think modernism was mistaken you eliminate quite a bit of quite accomplished verse in the conservative tradition, from Lowell to Merrill--even William Bronk, who is at one remove from Frost. You also get rid of Stevens and Yeats. I guess they were mistaken for not writing like Richard Wilbur!

Note: now Mike has changed his post so that the comment above is limited to questions of meter.