Robert Frost, (1874-1963) ©1954, Clara Sipprell

Robert Frost, (1874-1963) ©1954, Clara Sipprell

After President-Elect John F. Kennedy extended an offer to have Frost become the first poet to read at a presidential inauguration, Frost responded by telegraph…

If you can bear at your age the honor of being made president of the United States, I ought to be able at my age to bear the honor 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 first time taken into the affairs of statesmen.
— Robert Frost

Lyndon B. Johnson assisting Robert Frost during the inaugural ceremony for John F. Kennedy.; Photo: Paul Schutzer/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, but his family moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1884 following his father’s death. The move was actually a return, for Frost’s ancestors were originally New Englanders, and Frost became famous for his poetry’s engagement with New England locales, identities, and themes. Frost graduated from Lawrence High School, in 1892, as class poet (he also shared the honor of co-valedictorian with his wife-to-be Elinor White), and two years later, the New York Independent accepted his poem entitled “My Butterfly,” launching his status as a professional poet with a check for $15.00. Frost's first book was published around the age of 40, but he would go on to win a record four Pulitzer Prizes and become the most famous poet of his time, before his death at the age of 88.

Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-frost


Excerpt from “Birches”

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs


"The Gift Outright"

(The First Inaugural Poem)

The land was ours before we were the land’s 
She was our land more than a hundred years 
Before we were her people. She was ours 
In Massachusetts, in Virginia, 
But we were England’s, still colonials, 
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, 
Possessed by what we now no more possessed. 
Something we were withholding made us weak 
Until we found out that it was ourselves 
We were withholding from our land of living, 
And forthwith found salvation in surrender. 
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright 
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war) 
To the land vaguely realizing westward, 
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, 
Such as she was, such as she will become.

Frost Quotes

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
— Robert Frost
To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
— Robert Frost

 

Quaking Aspen Grove, Aspen, Colorado ©linda d lewis

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.
— Robert Frost
And were an epitaph to be my story I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.
— Robert Frost

Stopping by Woods On a Snowy Evening, Robert Frost

Read by Shane Morris. Photo by linda d lewis