{"id":119,"date":"2025-08-17T13:45:51","date_gmt":"2025-08-17T13:45:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/fys-pinsker\/?page_id=119"},"modified":"2025-09-03T12:44:31","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T12:44:31","slug":"robert-frost-the-gift-outright-1942","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/fys-pinsker\/texts\/robert-frost-the-gift-outright-1942\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Frost, \u201cThe Gift Outright\u201d (1942)"},"content":{"rendered":"

INTRODUCTION<\/h3>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Robert Frost (Poetry Foundation<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Robert Frost (1874-1963)<\/a> was probably the best known American poet of the twentieth century.\u00a0 He was born in San Francisco, California but spent most of his life in New England states such as Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont.\u00a0 This was a return to his roots since some of Frost’s ancestors had been early Puritan settlers in the seventeenth century.\u00a0 Frost always aspired to write poetry but passed through several jobs and occupations before publishing his first book of poetry just before World War I, when he was 40 years old.\u00a0 \u00a0He quickly became famous as a poet, however, and over the next few decades won four Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry, including for A\u00a0Witness Tree <\/em>(1942), the volume in which this poem appeared.\u00a0 He was a poet laureate (or consultant in poetry as it was then called), as designated by the Librarian of Congress, during the 1950s.\u00a0 In 1961, he recited this poem, “The Gift Outright” (1942), at the inaugural ceremony for John F. Kennedy at the president-elect’s request.\u00a0 The choice of poem, however, was almost accidental.\u00a0 Kennedy had asked him to read the 1942 poem (though the president-elect wanted a small change in the last line –see below).\u00a0 However,\u00a0 the poet had other ideas.\u00a0 Frost wrote a special poem for the ceremony (called “Dedication”), but he found himself unable to read the pages in the glare of the midday sun and so instead recited this verse from memory (changing the last line, though, as Kennedy had suggested, from “would become” to “will become”).\u00a0 It was the first reading of a poem at any presidential inaugural but it began a tradition that has continued intermittently ever since.\u00a0 Frost died two years later, at the age of 88.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>The Gift Outright<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The land was ours before we were the land\u2019s.
\nShe was our land more than a hundred years
\nBefore we were her people. She was ours
\nIn Massachusetts, in Virginia,
\nBut we were England\u2019s, still colonials,
\nPossessing what we still were unpossessed by,
\nPossessed by what we now no more possessed.
\nSomething we were withholding made us weak
\nUntil we found out that it was ourselves
\nWe were withholding from our land of living,
\nAnd forthwith found salvation in surrender.
\nSuch as we were we gave ourselves outright
\n(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
\nTo the land vaguely realizing westward,
\nBut still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
\nSuch as she was, such as she would become.<\/p>\n