In 1961, Robert Frost, overcoming old age and bad weather, recited his poem “The Gift Outright” to millions, becoming the first American poet to read at a presidential inauguration. A year later, President Kennedy asked Frost to act as a special ambassador to the Soviet Union and to deliver a message of “peaceful rivalry” to Premier Nikita Khrushchev, a considerable responsibility given the tensions of the time. Rarely in modern history had there been such a connection between poetry and power, a connection of a kind that rightly produces skepticism in critics and readers. Robert Frost had become the closest thing in the history of American letters to a national monument, a symbol of the Yankee virtues of independence, stoic belief, hard work, and common wisdom —in short, a sage. A color photograph of a white-maned and smiling Frost graced the March 1962 cover of Life magazine with the caption “America’s Ageless Poet.” His unprecedented and still unmatched four Pulitzer prizes, as well as forty-four honorary degrees, already had confirmed his place as the king of American poets. Frost enjoyed his fame but held a deeply ambivalent attitude toward his audience and its expectations. Cultivating the image of a folk philosopher, Frost skillfully avoided calling attention to the troubling complexity of his art. He wanted to be understood, but not easily, and he enjoyed playing the trickster to his audience. In a eulogy for Frost delivered in Amherst in October of 1963, President Kennedy called the poet “one of the granite figures of our time in America. . . . In honoring Robert Frost we therefore can pay honor to the deepest sources of our national strength.” But Kennedy, speaking less than a month before his assassination, added, “If Robert Frost was much honored during his lifetime, it was because many preferred to ignore his darker truths.”