What Poem Did Robert Frost Read at Jfk Inauguration
On January 20th, 1961 a poet read for the first fourth dimension during a presidential inauguration. The idea to invite Robert Frost to "say" a poem during the ceremony originated not with John F. Kennedy himself but with Stewart Fifty. Udall, an environmentalist, activist, former Arizona congressman and Secretary of the Interior designate, who had got to know Frost during his residency at the Library of Congress. It was a smashing notion and, though Kennedy joked that it could plow out to be a fault considering "you know that Robert Frost e'er steals any evidence he is function of," he immediately saw the advantages in having the United states'southward most distinguished poet by his side as he was sworn in. He must have seen, equally the poet William Meredith afterwards remarked, that Frost'due south presence would focus attending on the incoming president as "a man of culture" and, on a purely analytical level, this was a sufficient PR coup in itself. Notwithstanding there were other reasons for including Frost in the celebrations, not least the fact that the notoriously oppositional old "Puritan" had backed the Kennedy campaign from the beginning. In fact, he had shown his support even before Kennedy appear his candidacy. "The next President of the United states will be from Boston,"Frost declared during a gala dinner for his 85th birthday on March 26th, 1959. "He's a Puritan named Kennedy. The only Puritans left these days are the Roman Catholics. There. I guess I habiliment my politics on my sleeve." Frost would reiterate his adoration for the junior senator from Massachusetts on numerous occasions, and but as Eleanor Roosevelt'due south eventual endorsement appeared to align Kennedy's political vision with the spirit and values of the New Deal, so Frost'due south backing linked the youthful candidate to the latter-solar day Puritan ethic that Frost had come to embody, both in his writing and in his person. What Frost brought, in short, was resonance. Having made his conclusion, Kennedy telegraphed Frost early in Dec 1960. The old poet replied by telegram the next day, his acceptance of the honor tinged with a sly dig at Kennedy's supposed inexperience (to which Richard Nixon had made repeated reference during the presidential campaign): If you can carry at your age the laurels of being made President of the Us, I ought to be able at my age to conduct the award of taking some part in your inauguration. I may not be equal to it but i can accept it for my cause—the arts, poetry, now for the beginning time taken into the affairs of statesmen. This latter remark, as naïve equally information technology sounds today, is crucially of import in our understanding of the relationship betwixt Frost and Kennedy. Nosotros could dismiss his talk of a crusade equally rhetorical, the arty language of public discourse, merely that would be unfair for, like his friend Udall, Frost was prepared to pursue a careful merely committed working human relationship with those in power in order to pursue college goals than mere fame or reflected glory. Frost cared about the arts, and about poetry peculiarly, both in the US and elsewhere (when he visited Russia in 1962, he would be sufficiently impressed by Khrushchev'due south encouragement of poets such as Yevgeni Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky—and by the rehabilitation of Anna Akhmatova—to call the Soviet leader "a great homo"), and he felt artists should exist set to piece of work with the country to serve a higher crusade. Years afterwards, Stewart Udall recalled the following exchange with André Malraux during a Washington luncheon, in which Frost'southward seeming naïveté almost art and politics seems all too obvious in the confront of a more sophisticated and politically experienced writer: Frost: The Government tin use a poet to serve its purpose—but when he is no longer useful, the Authorities has a right to bandage him off. Malraux: Yes, simply that is not the ultimate truth. Call back of Caesar Augustus. The poet Virgil was used by him, was part of his circle of advisers. Simply today Virgil is the one we recall. Frost: Only that was a long time coming. Malraux: But isn't that what we're for? But was Frost actually existence naïve here? Because his commitment to democratic politics, on the one hand, and his called art, on the other, he would have felt that it was his duty to work with government, whenever he could, to further both causes, rather than to oppose power purely as a matter of course. He fancied himself a political animal, amidst other things. When he discovered that he was not (as he did later, on his return from Moscow), it injure him desperately, and fifty-fifty though he would still maintain that, when he was no longer useful, his authorities had every right to cast him off, he was dismayed by his failure. The initial telegram exchange gave way to a telephone conversation, during which Kennedy suggested the erstwhile poet might write something new for the ceremony. Then, when Frost rejected that idea as too demanding, they agreed he might read "The Souvenir Outright"—though, in a motion that could accept jeopardized the entire enterprise, Kennedy asked that the poem's final line be changed to audio a more than optimistic annotation than the original, which had been written during the Depression. That original poem ends: Such as we were we gave ourselves outright Kennedy suggested that "such as she would become" be altered to read "such as she will get" and, surprisingly, Frost agreed, if rather grudgingly. Nonetheless, in spite of his refusal to contemplate such a task, he soon began working on a new poem especially for the occasion, a 67-line variation on the heroic couplet grade that both celebrates the arts in public life and provides a revealing elaboration of a historical perspective that "The Gift Outright" only partly addresses. Frost chosen this new poem simply "Dedication"—and it was his plan, until the very last infinitesimal, to read this, and not the altered version of "The Gift Outright," at the inauguration. That new work, conceived and executed in a remarkably short space, is in many ways a revelation of Frost'due south mature political vision, an affirmation of a sure type of ability that both echoes and interrogates Kennedy's own vision of "what together we can exercise for the freedom of human," peculiarly in its final lines: There is a phone call to life a little sterner, Nevertheless, a shut reading of "Dedication" reveals a darker side to its politics. Information technology could be argued, for example, that the kind ofimperialist thinking that led to Vietnam, simply a few years later, is unsaid in the lines We meet how seriously the races swarm And, while no directly mention is made of the wholesale eradication of native peoples and the invasion of Mexican land, the post-obit lines would come to seem, at the very least unfortunate, as the 1960s began: The new earth Christopher Columbus found. Reading that last line, it is hard not to retrieve of Bob Dylan's satirical song "With God On Our Side," in which God's approval is affirmed at the end of every verse, a scornful expression of disdain for America's wars, from the killing of the Indians through the Spanish-American and Civil conflicts to the Cold War, about which Dylan'southward immature Midwestern protagonist knows nix, except that he is supposed to hate and fear all Russians. In the final analysis, "Dedication" comes across as a rather thin piece of Augustan pastiche, in which Frost's hopes for the arts alloy with an outmoded triumphalist vision with an all besides axiomatic whiff of Manifest Destiny taken for granted. Luckily the glare off the snow on Inauguration Day, combined with his weak eyesight, forced him to abandon this new and complex piece of work; instead, he said "The __________________________________ Excerpted from The Music of Time: Verse in the Twentieth Century by John Burnside. Copyright © 2020 by John Burnside. Published by Princeton University Press. Reprinted past permission.
(The deed of gift was many deeds of state of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
Only still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
And braver for the earner, learner, yearner.
Less criticism of the field and court
And more than preoccupation with the sport.
It makes the prophet in us all presage
The glory of a side by side Augustan age
Of a power leading from its strength and pride,
Of young ambition eager to be tried,
Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,
In any game the nations want to play.
A golden historic period of verse and power
In their attempts at sovereignty and form.
They are our wards we remember to some extent
For the time being and with their consent,
To teach them how Democracy is meant.
The French, the Castilian, and the Dutch were downed
And counted out. Heroic deeds were washed.
Elizabeth the Outset and England won.
Now came on a new club of the ages
That in the Latin of our founding sages
(Is it non written on the dollar bill
We carry in our handbag and pocket still?)
God nodded his approving of as good. 
Source: https://lithub.com/we-didnt-always-pair-poets-to-presidents-how-robert-frost-ended-up-at-jfks-inauguration/
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