18 pages • 36 minutes read
Robert FrostA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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.
By Robert Frost
Acquainted with the Night
Robert Frost
After Apple-Picking
Robert Frost
A Time To Talk
Robert Frost
Birches
Robert Frost
Dust of Snow
Robert Frost
Fire and Ice
Robert Frost
Mending Wall
Robert Frost
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Robert Frost
October
Robert Frost
Once by the Pacific
Robert Frost
Out, Out—
Robert Frost
Putting in the Seed
Robert Frost
Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
Robert Frost
The Death of the Hired Man
Robert Frost
The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost
West-Running Brook
Robert Frost