The inauguration of John F. Kennedy on January 20, 1961, was memorable not just for the young president's stirring address but also for the participation of the eighty-six-year-old Robert Frost, recently (1958/59) poet laureate of the United States. At the request of the president-elect, who had admired Frost's poetry since his prep-school days at Choate and often quoted his lines in campaign speeches, the elderly poet agreed to recite for the occasion his widely anthologized poem “The Gift Outright” (1942), in which that great spokesman of patriotism argues that our land— “still unstoried, artless, unenhanced”—did not become the America we know until its people surrendered themselves to it through deeds of war and exploration westward. As the day approached, however, and although he had attempted few “occasional” poems in the course of his career, Frost began to think that he should compose a special poem for the unprecedented occasion. After all, never before had an American president-elect asked a poet to participate in his inauguration. Working late into the night before the great day, Frost jotted down some forty-two lines that he intended to read as a prefatory dedication to “The Gift Outright.”

During the event, the dedicatory poem never got read. In the brilliant sunlight of the frigid winter morning, Frost was unable to decipher the still fresh lines of his new poem—despite the assistance of the newly inaugurated vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who stepped up to the rostrum and sought to shield the poet and his windswept typescript from the glare. (Frost joked later that the incident was Apollo's doing: the god of sun and poetry had decided that, since he was striving to emulate Homer, he should be blind like the Greek epic poet.) After a few lines Frost gave up the attempt and, instead, recited from memory and in a strong voice “The Gift Outright,” altering the last line, as Kennedy had requested, from the conditional to the future: “Such as she was, such as she will become.” The audience was enthralled by the poet's bravura performance, and Frost became known that day—through television and reports in other media—to the most enormous public of his long and distinguished career.