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. The forced labor made America prosperous. History indicates that Americans continued “withholding” (Line 8) and didn’t fully “surrender” (Line 11) to the land. The people who gave themselves to the land were Indigenous people and the enslaved Black people. They’re as much a part of the “we” as the colonists and settlers who became Americans.

Socioeconomic class also complicates the poem's use of the plural first-person pronoun “we.” In White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016), the American historian Nancy Isenberg tells how white people from the lower socioeconomic class remained marginalized and stuck in poverty. Those without money didn’t benefit from dispossessing Indigenous people or forcing Black people into slavery. The slave system capsized the labor market. Paying jobs that could have helped the financially insecure white people went to unpaid enslaved people. In the context of white people, the poem’s “we” remains discordant. History reveals that there isn’t a “we,” but multiple groups with divergent aims and interests.