"His poem, ‘The Gift Outright', reveals his patriotic fervor and presents the history of his country since the days of colonialism.
Booth states “we became a free nation not in surrender to a parent-state, but by giving ourselves outright to the revolutionary impulse,”[5] making reference to America gaining independence from Britain.
Siobhan Philips directly criticizes this aspect of the poem, mentioning “the poem’s racist assumption of a white, European, landowning “we” and its racist ignorance of how the same Europeans worked to eradicate Native American culture and perpetuate slavery.”[7] Lionel Trilling’s criticism of the poet was perceived to be an attack not only on the values of the poet but on the American myth overall.
Frost is “provoking readers’ thought”[8] by using words to create the idea that before North America was populated by Europeans, the land was uninhabited and uncivilized.
Hamida Bosmajian believes that the entirety of the poem “can be seen as a joke at the expense of negligible folk”,[8] implying that uneducated people are unable to understand what the poet is saying.
During the ceremony, Frost was unable to read his own work because of the sun’s reflection on the paper making the words illegible, so he recited “The Gift Outright” which he had written and published years earlier by memory.
[11] “The Gift Outright” tells a story about how Europeans came to what would become The Americas, an “unstoried, artless, [and] unenhanced”[12] land, and supposedly turned it into something more enhanced and full of history.