I Might, I Would, I Will: Remembering Frost's "The Gift Outright"

As Yale University professor and poet Elizabeth Alexander prepares for the most important poetry reading of her life—on Tuesday, January 20, she'll read at the inauguration of now President-elect Barack Obama—it's worth taking a moment to reconsider what has become in most people's minds the gold-standard for inaugural poets: Robert Frost's recitation of "The Gift Outright" at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. There, blinded by the sun's glare off of the snow and baffled by high winds, the 86 year-old Frost had to give up on the poem he'd in fact prepared for the occasion ("Dedication") and recited from memory one that he'd written more than 20 years earlier. "The Gift Outright" is now so linked to 1961 that many people assume Frost wrote it for the inauguration itself.

Here is the text of the poem Frost read in 1961, as recorded by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum:

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.

"The Gift Outright" had a pretty long and interesting history before 1961, however. It first appeared in the Spring 1942 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, although Frost claimed he had written it six or seven years earlier—smack dab in the middle of the Great Depression. As VQR notes in its history of "The Gift Outright," Frost soon thereafter revised the poem's last line for publication in The Witness Tree (1942), changing it from "Such as she was, such as she might become" to "Such as she was, such as she would become." Indeed, this is the version (pictured to the left) that the Library of Congress presents as the 1961 inaugural manuscript, even though this manuscript version contains a note in the upper right-hand corner that reads "Three War Poems II" and is identified in the bottom left as being from The Witness Tree in 1942. Clearly—as will become even more evident in a moment—this handwritten manuscript is a version of the poem Frost read in 1961, but it's not the actual poem he recited.

In addition to using "The Gift Outright" in The Witness Tree (which won him his fourth Pulitzer Prize, in 1943), Frost also used the poem on his Christmas card for 1942 (pictured here). Late in 2008, "Poetry & Popular Culture" showcased some of the Christmas cards which Frost produced in collaboration with Spiral Press printer Joseph Blumenthal. What's particularly interesting to "Poetry & Popular Culture" at the present moment, however, is how Frost—sending his holiday wishes a year after the attack on Pearl Harbor—politicizes the Christmas holiday by greeting friends with one of his "war poems." For a poet whom many people assume to be pretty darned unpolitical, this is a pretty political move.

So the history of "The Gift Outright" was a fairly complex and political one before 1961 even rolled around—a history in which Frost repeatedly situated the poem in relation to the world he was living in and even changed its wording to serve as a sort of barometer for how he was currently feeling about the U.S. VQR in fact points this out, arguing that "The substitution of 'would' for 'might' makes the poem more optimistic, more assured of America’s future glory. The version published in VQR seems to reflect a deep and perhaps healthy uncertainty about the nation’s future trajectory." It makes sense that, writing in the middle of the Depression, Frost would articulate his sense of the nation's future in less certain terms than he would on the eve of World War II when calls for patriotism demanded stronger language on all fronts, poetic fronts included. If Edna St. Vincent Millay could be convinced into writing a book-length propaganda poem (The Murder of Lidice) at the bequest of the Writer's War Board, then certainly Frost could be moved to change a verb from "might" to "would."

What VQR's history of "The Gift Outright" doesn't tell, however, is that Frost would go on and change the poem and its final verb another time, just as the poem's political stakes were at an all-time high. If the Kennedy Museum's transcript is in fact correct—and it is only partly so, as my postscript to this entry explains—it reveals that in 1961 Frost ended with the line "Such as she was, such as she will become." If VQR's argument about the significance of the verb changes holds water, then what are we to make of this move—from "might" to "would" to "will"? If the shift from conditional Depression-Era "might" to definitive Wartime "would" reflects Frost's changing levels of optimism, then how are we to interpret the postponement of American success implied in the shift to the future tense "will become" used at Kennedy's inauguration? Was the 86 year-old Frost tapping into and reinforcing the forward-looking and progressive rhetoric of the 35th and youngest American President? Or was Frost audaciously tempering his enthusiasm for the nation and qualifying his Cold War endorsement of Kennedy by shifting tenses from "would" to "will"?

In the way of a conclusion to this history, it's interesting to sit and listen to In Their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poetry—a four-CD anthology of 79 poets reading their poems aloud—which includes what sounds like Frost's recitation of "The Gift Outright" in 1961. Rather than play up the most poetically ambivalent moment of "The Gift Outright," its final line, the recording tapers off at this exact moment and blends into Robert Graves beginning "To Juan at the Winter Solstice" so that the listener can barely hear in the overlap of the two voices whether Frost is in fact saying "might" or "would" or "will" (though I believe it's "will"). Many people prize these sorts of recordings for the sense of authenticity they seem to add to poems; hearing a poet read in his or her own voice (as the anthology's title suggests) supposedly restores something that the poem otherwise lacks. "Poetry & Popular Culture" isn't going to agree or disagree with that assessment (not now anyway), so much as it wants to stress that even the recording of poets reading their work is an act of literary interpretation. Here, the sound people of In Their Own Voices actually obscure what might in fact be the most interesting verb-iage in "The Gift Outright." Presenting itself as documentary evidence, the recording nonetheless erases the most contentious—and perhaps the most political—part of Frost's poem.

All of this history, of course, was made possible by the serendipitously bad weather which forced Frost off script in 1961 and burned the poem he wrote in the 1930s into the popular imagination. Let's hope—as the temperatures in Iowa City threaten to plunge to -15 tonight—that Elizabeth Alexander might have similar luck when she reads this year.

Postscript: The history of "The Gift Outright" and its final line grows ever more complex the more one listens and looks. As the actual transcript of Frost's reading reveals, Frost did end the 1961 inaugural poem with "will become" but worked his way up to that ending by first sifting through a number of other verb tenses: was, would, and hath. As Frost notes, he uses the future tense "will become" expressly "for this occasion"—a reminder from one of our most "timeless" poets that not only are all poems occasional poems, but that occasional poems (not to mention their recordings and transcriptions) are political poems as well.

Laura Bush Unveils George W. Bush State China

Appeared in the Press-Citizen January 10, 2008

Some might wonder, in an economy this unstable,
about the First Lady’s departing wishes
to leave the White House with a set of dishes
that isn’t even microwavable.
Drapes, perhaps. Maybe knick-knacks or doodads
to decorate a shelf or windowsill,
but 320 plates for a cool half mil?
Some might react with surprise, oh-nos, egads,
and what-in-the-world-was-Laura-Bush-thinking?
But not me. I don’t want Sarkozy sitting there
mocking the presidential tupperware
or having to use a styrofoam cup for drinking.
Besides, the china isn’t all that bold:
the plates she chose are only rimmed with gold.







Update: Interestingly, the public appears to have some, er, appetite for the subject of Presidential China, if not for "good bad" poetry itself. Over the weekend, both the Tallahassee Democrat and the San Francisco Chronicle picked "Laura Bush Unveils George W. Bush State China" off of the wire and used it—one in print, one online.

More on Good Bad Poetry:

"Writing Good Bad Poetry"
"My Poetic License"
"At the Foxhead on Election Night"
"OMG! Buddhist Nun Texting Novel"
"Dinosaur Descendant to be Dad at 111"
"Cat Chasing Mouse Leads to 24 Hour Blackout"
"Man Faces Jail for Smuggling Iguanas in His Prosthetic Leg"
" 'Lingerie Mayor' Vows to Stay in Office"
"O.J. Simpson Questioned in Vegas Incident"

Dear Reader: Get a Set of the Palace Cards!

"Poetry & Popular Culture" continues to showcase the small-business poets of yesteryear—such as Dr. C.B. Weagley Veterinary Surgeon and C.G. Blatt's Photographic Emporium—who hawked their services, wares, and varying levels of expertise via poetry. Relying on their bardness to take care of their bidness, these inglorious Miltons participated in the project of America's free enterprise if not the freeing of its verse.

About a month ago, "Poetry & Popular Culture" introduced readers to The Palace Saloon and Restaurant of Hagerstown, Maryland, which issued a series of bawdy poem cards around the turn of the century in order to promote the fine dining and drinking establishment. This month—after fielding several requests from eager readers asking for more—we are happy to present poem number 13, "Ladies Favorite," for your reading pleasure. In addition to the double entendre that drives the verse and its casual use of rhyming fourteener couplets hearkening back to the 16th century, "Poetry & Popular Culture" is especially pleased by how "Ladies Favorite" evokes in its penultimate line the "dear reader" of Victorian convention:

Ladies Favorite

Ladies like it in the morning, some prefer it at night,
Some love it Oh! how dearly, and for it they would fight;
Some love to gently play with and feel its silken hair,
To see it sweet with passion and spit up in the air,
Some take it in their little hand and stroke its little head,
Some take it in the cellar, some take it in the bed;
Some gently rub it up and down, with soft and tender hands,
And so dearly do they love it—they quickly make it stand;
Some take it on the housetop—on the comet to gaze,
And others toward the twinkling star make its bull head raise.
Many have been sorely bitten by the naughty little thing,
And then give to others so they may feel its sting;
Forgive me my dear reader I forgot to tell you that—
The subject of my little poem is nothing but a Cat.

Grab your teacups, folks, give that parasol a turn, and gather up your petticoats indeed!

Poetry Beat: San Francisco

"Poetry & Popular Culture" has just returned from a week in San Francisco, part of which was spent attending the 2008 convention of the Modern Language Association—the largest gathering of teachers and scholars in the humanities. There was admittedly some material of interest (a panel on Byron as popular culture, for example) but, as usual, we found ourselves wanting more scholarship addressing the intersections of our two favorite topics: poetry and popular culture. The fires of this perpetual craving were further stoked, however, by the city of San Francisco itself—the birthplace of Robert Frost, by the way—where we were assaulted by poetries of all sorts and on nearly all fronts.

The onetime haunting ground of Bret Harte gave us, of course, the San Francisco Renaissance and City Lights Bookstore—the first American publisher of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and center of the subsequent 1957 obscenity trial. If one looks hard enough in North Beach, one can even find Lawrence Ferlinghetti Way; poetry has become part of the city's literal map as well as its literary one. San Francisco State University is home to The Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives, an amazing storehouse of audio recordings of poets reading their work. And the Mission District includes 826 Valencia, a rockin' pirate-supply store and after-school literacy tutoring center which offers—so a flier I picked up explains—a "Poetry Class for Teens." Open to 18 students, the class will be taught this March by Meghan Adler and Emilie Coulson. It carries the following description:

"Do you find yourself comparing the rain to a harmonica, your heart to your breakfast or some other unlikely noun? Do you scribble song lyrics in your science notebook? WARNING: you may be a poet. Join us to learn about new forms, practice old ones, and carve out a little time for poetry. Share your favorite poets and test-drive their best techniques. Bring those words you've been hiding in a diary out into the open! We will create our own literary journal/chapbook and have a poetry reading (berets are optional)."

If poetry is in San Francisco's history and bookstores and literacy programs, not to mention on its audiotapes and maps, it's also embedded in its sidewalks. The language around many storm drains not only reminds city dwellers to (re)consider what they toss into the sewers but does so in rhyme: "Only Rain / Down the Drain."

At risk of sounding too much like a homebody, "Poetry & Popular Culture" found itself overwhelmed by poetry within the hotel room as well. We flipped on the tv to watch Adrienne Shelly's 2007 film Waitress (starring Keri Russell) and encountered a character who composes spontaneous poetry in his wooing of one of the main character's best friends. We then flipped the channel to MTV, where the dating reality show Next is narrated in rhyme. We flipped the channel again—can you tell we don't have cable tv in the "Poetry & Popular Culture" office?—where Puffs Plus tissues were being pitched in rhyme; not to be outdone, a longer infomercial for Snuggies (the blanket with sleeves!) incorporated rhyme and was composed in a loose but indisputable four-beat iambic line.

In short, no matter where we went or where we looked in the city by the bay, poetry had not only gotten there first but was waiting for us. Which is exactly how we like it.

Robert Frost's Christmas Cards

Like many establishments this time of year, “Poetry & Popular Culture” recently held its annual Christmas office party. Over a couple of pints at our favorite local watering hole, Shakespeare's Bar & Grill, we exchanged seasonal rhymes and reflected on the state of holiday greeting card verse. Indeed, my kitchen table still has a stack of cards waiting to be posted. The poetry in them isn't pretty either, and even "Poetry & Popular Culture" staff members (particularly Polly the Paper Shredder and Carl the Copy Boy) found it hard not to shudder at lines such as these inside an American Greetings card:

Christmas...
the best time to remember
the nicest people
in the warmest way

Or consider this next example, inside a Hallmark card that features a skiing penguin dressed in stocking cap and scarf jumping joyfully off an icy slope:

great joy
good cheer
all yours
all year!

This quatrain isn't entirely unremarkable. We kind of like how lines 1 & 2 are tied together by the alliteration of "great" and "good" just as 3 & 4 are linked by "yours" and "year." Even more, we like how those alliterative couplets get broken by the rhyme of "cheer" and "year" between lines 2 & 4—an abcb rhyming pattern that makes us think of the common measure of many hymns, which is quite appropriate given the season's religious orientation. Nevertheless, the poem left us definitely underwhelmed—not a very common experience here at "Poetry & Popular Culture."

All of this made me think of Robert Frost and printer Joseph Blumenthal. For nearly 30 years (from 1935 to 1962, at least), Frost and Blumenthal partnered up to produce finely-printed, delicately-illustrated Christmas cards featuring Frost's poetry, such as the 1961 card pictured to the left. Blumenthal, who ran the Spiral Press of New York from 1926 to 1971—the press for which the typeface now known as Emerson was first designed—made it a practice to work with well-known writers such as W.H. Auden, Pablo Neruda, William Carlos Williams, Robinson Jeffers and Franklin Roosevelt. So it was with Frost, though it's probably more accurate to call the Frost-Blumenthal productions holiday "greetings" rather than "cards," since many of them were in fact small, saddle-stapled chapbooks and not cards as such.

Some of the greetings reprinted well-known poems such as "The Wood-Pile" (which first appeared, in book form, in North of Boston [1915]) but many others purported to present "a new poem by Robert Frost." This performance of newness—the unveiling of a new poem just in time for Christmas—must have appealed to the people who bought the cards & sent them out, the patrons of Spiral Press and thus patrons of Frost. For not only did Frost send them to his own friends and family, and not only did Blumenthal send them to express his season's greetings, but the Spiral Press printed them for other parties as well. As you can see from the greeting page to the left, Blumenthal left space so he could personalize each card—here in a different color ink—which was no doubt a major selling point for the consumer, who could claim in a roundabout way partial responsibility for the poem's coming-into-being.

Spiral Press worked with a number of artists over the years, each of whom produced designs that go beautifully with Frost's work despite the frequent disconnection of those designs from overtly seasonal themes (see the very cool atomic motif decorating the cover of "Some Science Fiction" to the left, for example). Nowadays the cards are collectors' items you can find on eBay and elsewhere—$25 a pop for some, up to $500 for others that have been signed. We here at "Poetry & Popular Culture" have seen our fair share of them thanks to the nice collection housed in the Special Collections division of the University of Iowa's Libraries. We look forward to piecing together a more complete history of the cards. Who initiated the collaboration? What was the annual press run? Did the press have a list of subscribers committed to buying a set every year, and how much money did Blumenthal and Frost eventually make off of the limited editions?

There is a special link between Frost and Christmas in the American mind, one that Frost and his publishers weren't afraid to play up. Take, for example, Frost's Snow to Snow, a 1936 chapbook issued by Henry Holt & Company which presents twelve of Frost's well-known verses, each one corresponding to a month of the year and ending with December's Christmassy "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." The singular importance of "Stopping By Woods" is established by a facsimile of the handwritten manuscript placed prior to the table of contents. Thus, while the book ends in Christmas, it also begins there as well.

Did Frost write with the potential marketability of Christmas-related items in mind? The poem "Christmas Trees"—first printed in Mountain Interval (1920) and four years later on the broadside seen just above—suggests maybe so. Interestingly, this broadside version of "Christmas Trees" leaves off the subtitle that Frost appended to the poem: "A Christmas Circular Letter." Indeed, while he may not have been thinking of Christmas cards as early as 1920, this subtitle suggests he was well aware of the special communicative moment that holiday greetings might afford a poet who remained open to its possibilities.

Seasonal Meter Readers: Bartlet's Book of Iambic Verse

In Season 1, Episode 10 of Aaron Sorkin's television drama The West Wing, President Josiah Bartlet takes several members of his staff Christmas shopping at a rare book store in D.C. Walking down an aisle with best friend and Chief of Staff Leo McGarry, Bartlet finds a book he recognizes, and the following exchange takes place.

President Bartlet: Ooh! The Fables of Phaedrus—1886, first edition, red leather label, gilt lettering, engraved frontis. Phaedrus, you know—who was a slave but later granted his freedom by Augustus—wrote his animal fables in iambic verse.

Chief of Staff McGarry: Well, nothing says Christmas like animal fables in iambic verse.

President Bartlet: That's what I say.

"Poetry & Popular Culture" couldn't agree more. Season's greetings, all.

News Flash: Paging Edgar Guest...

In the New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon is on record saying, "I myself make no distinction between 'light' verse and—what?—heavy verse."

Muldoon was speaking about Roger Angell's year-end poem "Greetings, Friends", one of the last remaining instantiations of the Carrier's Address—a retrospective ditty distributed by tip-seeking newspaper boys in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

If you want to see examples of Carriers' Addresses done up the old-school way—long, rhyming, stand-alone recaps of the year's events oftentimes penned and printed by newsboys themselves—check out the amazing collection maintained by the Brown University Center for Digital Initiatives.