Inaugural poets - CNN.com Robert Kennedy personally asked celebrated poet (and Kennedy supporter) Robert Frost to recite a poem at his presidential inauguration. Frost was the first poet to do so in the history of the event. During the 1961 inauguration, Frost recited "The Gift Outright." This is an excerpt from the poem: The land was ours before we were the land's. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England's, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed.