Loving Robert Frost Minus his National Origin Myth: Rhina Espaillat’s Expansive Americanness

• In Event: The Poetic Legacy and Radically Inclusive Vision of Rhina P. Espaillat

Abstract

Professor Silvio Torres-Saillant's paper undertakes a reading of US Poet Laureate Robert Frost’s poem “The Gift Outright,” which the beloved American poet read at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, and its starkly jingoistic sequel “The Gift Outright of ‘The Gift Outright.’” The reading examines Frost’s militantly Anglocentric ideology of US heritage in relation to contemporary understandings of justice, equality, and inclusion as tantamount to the very survival of the US population in our fractious chapter of American history. A devout admirer of Frost’s poetry, Espaillat inadvertently offers a national vision of the United States that radically departs from her admired poet’s ethnically exclusionary lens. Espaillat’s vision of Americanness may be found in such poems as “The Old Ones,” a text that accounts for the contradiction of being an American who loves her country but who comes from the flanks of the conquered peoples whose labor power and reduction of human dignity largely accounts for the rise of the United States as the mightiest power on earth. Contending that every single poet who has read at a presidential inauguration after Frost—Maya Angelou, Miller Williams, Elizabeth Alexander, and Richard Blanco— has felt compelled to respond to Frost’s exclusionary Americanness, Torres-Saillant’s paper considers the implications of Espaillat’s inclusive and humane vision as it relates not only to literature but also to social relations overall.

Author

• Silvio A Torres-Saillant, Syracuse University