20 januari 1961

I november 1960 stod det klart att John F Kennedy valts till USA:s president med minsta möjliga marginal. Poeten Robert Frost var en av många som talat för Kennedy i valkampanjen och han blev ombedd att recitera en dikt vid installationsceremonin i Washington i januari året därpå. Frost var då 86 år gammal och mycket bräcklig. Det blev några dramatiska ögonblick då den åldrige poeten famlade efter sitt papper med den nyskrivna dikten - men så återvann han fattningen och läste i stället med klar röst sin "The Gift Outright" utantill. Raderna på papperet fick tas fram vid ett annat tillfälle.
Frost gick ur tiden två år senare och Kennedy skrev en vacker tribut till den avlidne poetens minne.

"There is a story that some years ago an interested mother wrote to a principal of a school, 'Don't teach my boy poetry, he's going to run for Congress'. I've never taken the view that the world of politics and the world of poetry are so far apart. --- They are united because their greatness depends on courage."

Allt detta och mer därtill kan man läsa i "The Road not Taken - finding America in the poem everyone loves and almost everyone gets wrong" av David Orr. (Penguin books 2016).

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 would become. 

(The Gift Outright av Robert Frost).