The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Frost, Robert. "The Gift Outright." The Poetry Foundation Online. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53013/the-gift-outright.

“The Gift Outright” is a 16-line iambic pentameter poem written by American poet Robert Frost. Frost originally recited the poem at the College of William and Mary in 1941, and it was published the following year in the Virginia Quarterly Review. However, the poem’s most famous recitation took place at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961. Frost had composed a new poem for the ceremony, but he was unable to read from the typewritten page he had prepared due to wind and reflection of sunlight off the snow. He instead recited his earlier poem, “The Gift Outright,” from memory. Although its themes of American self-sacrifice would have resonated urgently with its 1941 audience (the poem's first reading occurred days before the US entered World War II), its reprisal at the Kennedy inauguration shows how the poem’s vision of America remained vital across the twentieth century.

“The Gift Outright” is a patriotic poem depicting the founding of the United States as a self-sacrificial “gift” the earliest Americans made to their land. The poem is narrated by an American “we” who begins the poem reflecting on the colonial period. The land belonged to Americans, the speaker says, but Americans were still English subjects and did not yet belong to the land. These Americans gave themselves "outright” (12) to their land through the Revolutionary War, which led to the period of territorial expansion that followed. Ending on the image of the “unstoried, artless” land extending “vaguely… westward” (14-15), Frost construes the American identity as one that is always unfinished and developing.