"On October 26, 1963, just four weeks before he was assassinated, John F. Kennedy travelled to Amherst College to honor an American poet. Robert Frost, who had recited "The Gift Outright" at Kennedy's Inauguration, had died earlier in the year, at the age of eighty-eight. Now the college was dedicating a library in his name. Kennedy arrived at Amherst by helicopter and, before an audience of students and scholars, paid tribute to the role of the independent artist in society."
"The rhetoric and rhythms of the speech, which was drafted by the historian and Kennedy confidant Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., are high-flown, very much of their era. In " The Kennedy Imprisonment," Garry Wills was particularly scathing about the New Frontiersmen and their urbane self-fashioning, their determination to leave behind what they saw as the cultural enervation and poky suburbanism of the Eisenhower years."
On October 26, 1963, John F. Kennedy traveled to Amherst College to honor Robert Frost and to dedicate a library in Frost's name. Robert Frost had died earlier that year at age eighty-eight. Kennedy arrived by helicopter and paid tribute to the independent artist, calling Frost “one of the granite figures of our time in America.” Kennedy stated that poetry counters arrogance, broadens human concern, cleanses corruption, and that art establishes basic human truth as a touchstone for judgment. The speech’s rhetoric, drafted by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., reflected high‑flown, Ivy League sensibilities and drew sharp criticism from some contemporaries.
Read at The New Yorker
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