Robert Frost’s forgotten notebook: America’s moral panic over JFK’s Irish Catholic presidency

Abstract This essay discusses a shadow notebook composition which Frost wrote while preparing the dedication poem he had planned to read along with ‘The Gift Outright’ at Kennedy’s inauguration, and which betrays fear that the president might suffer a political downfall or even assassination. The essay argues that Frost viewed the election of Kennedy as a manifestation of America’s collective desires and anxieties, which he understood in distinctly sexual terms. He hoped his country would pursue ‘high eugenics’: an openness to whatever outcomes this relationship might yield. However, the poem shows Frost to be wary of the nation’s defensive anxieties, which he configured as fears of infection and castration. The symbolic ‘beheading’ of Kennedy he envisioned is one of several modes he contemplated as America’s possible bodily responses to the alien Irish Catholic element threatening to disrupt the nation’s enduring biological and cultural integrity. Frost hoped the nation would relinquish its defensive grip and open itself to this Irish Catholic factor, making room for it within its body politic. An intricate network of allusions threaded through his seldom-read notebooks, as well as his speeches and letters, reveals a new, thus far unexamined, perspective on Frost’s view of the Kennedy presidency.