In a 1975 essay, where I proposed Frost's “The Wind and the Rain” as his best “unknown” poem, I also claimed that the opening ten poems in A Witness Tree (1942) (“The Wind and the Rain” is one of them), is the most impressive sequence of poems to be found anywhere in the poet's work. The sequence, I wrote, contained “extremes of delicate tenderness and of shocking brutality,” and its pervasive melancholy reached a depth not hitherto encountered, or to be encountered again, in Frost. Recently two accounts of the biographical circumstances out of which A Witness Tree emerged have caused me and perhaps others to think again about that book, especially its opening sequence, and about the degree to which a poet's art can be more fully understood and appreciated when we learn more about the life experiences that surround and motivate it. My comments here are directed toward clarifying, or at least exploring further, these matters of literary and biographical criticism.