The Gift Outright

In Critical Companion to Robert Frost (Facts on File, 2007), the literary scholar Deirdre Fagan examines Frost’s poem and quotes him saying “The Gift Outright” is “a history of the United States in a dozen lines of blank verse” (138). The poem is 16 lines, not 12, and it omits explicit references to slavery and Indigenous people.

American historians like Howard Zinn and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz document the violent, deadly history of America. Speaking for Americans, Frost’s speaker states, “The land was ours before we were the land's” (Line 1). Yet the land didn’t belong to Americans, and the established presence of Indigenous people isn’t, as Dunbar-Ortiz says in An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (2014), an “accusation” but a “historical reality” (quoted from eBook edition, unpaginated). Indigenous people were there first, and they didn’t leave the land “unstoried, artless, unenhanced” (Line 15) but created advanced societies with roads, surgery, medicine, and dentists. The early colonists (future Americans) largely survived because the Indigenous people built up a fair amount of the territory.

As the Americans waged war against Indigenous people, they enslaved millions of Black people to cultivate profitable crops like tobacco and cotton and build key American structures like the White House.