This is perhaps unsurprising, considering the extent to which Frost became identified with America itself in his late career. If Time had considered him in 1923 to be “a poet first of all of the American character,” by 1950 he had become “a native American voice unsurpassed by any American poet since Whitman.” This elevation occurred even as his private life became bleaker and bleaker. In the span of only six years, his daughter Marjorie died after childbirth, Elinor died from a heart attack, and his son Carol committed suicide. “I expect to have to go depths below depths in thinking,” he wrote to Bernard DeVoto in 1938, “before I catch myself and can say what I want to be while I last.” Yet even the weight of these losses couldn’t slow Frost’s ascent. By the late 1950s, he was a recognized national figure whose autograph was routinely sought out even in the remote territory of East Middlebury, Vermont. (The Waybury Inn, where Frost used to have dinner, still maintains a Robert Frost Suite.) After his friend Sherman Adams, the former governor of New Hampshire, became a special assistant to Dwight Eisenhower, Frost met several times with the president, at one point giving him a book inscribed, “The strong are saying nothing until they see,” a line from his similarly titled poem. (Eisenhower would later confide, “I like his maxim most of all.”) When Frost was honored by the Poetry Society of America in 1958, Eisenhower provided a statement that practically wrapped Frost in the flag: “The sensitive and imaginative words of the poet contribute much to the spirit of a people. It is fortunate that our nation is blessed with Citizens like Robert Frost, who can express our innermost feelings and speak so clearly to us of our land and life.”

But it was Frost’s relationship with John F. Kennedy that transformed him from a merely famous writer into a national monument. Frost had supported Kennedy during his campaign against Nixon (it’s a testament to Frost’s unique status among poets that his goodwill mattered at all), and after Kennedy’s victory, he was asked to read at the inauguration. He agreed, and the resulting two minutes are the closest American poetry has ever come to the sound, as Whitman puts it, of “a call in the midst of the crowd; / My own voice, orotund, sweeping, and final.” You’d never guess this from the way the reading begins, though. As Frost approaches the podium, the first thing the modern viewer notices is how old he seems (he was eighty-six) and how vulnerable he looks in his enormous black coat, which seems as if it’s been incompletely filled with satiny, overused pillows. Right away, he struggles. In the bright winter sun, he can’t see the pages of the new poem he’s written for the occasion—an awful piece, nearly doggerel—and he fumbles painfully through the first couple of lines, prompting Lyndon Johnson to offer his hat for shade. Frost refuses, with a joke, and then, only seconds before the episode would have collapsed into humiliation, puts the pages of the new composition aside and simply begins reciting “The Gift Outright” from memory.