Last June at a White House meeting, President Joe Biden gave India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi an extraordinary gift, an autographed first edition-copy of the Collected Poems of Robert Frost, one of America’s greatest poets whose 150th anniversary is being celebrated at Dartmouth College where he taught as a Ticknor Fellow; Middlebury College where he co-founded the Bread and Loaf School; the academia from coast to coast as well as poetry lovers everywhere.
Prime Minister Modi responded with an equally unique gift, the Ten Principal Upanishads by Purohit Swami and William Butler Yeats, the renowned Irish poet whom Biden occasionally references and quotes in his speeches. In India, however, the gift of Robert Frost’s poetic collection was seen as a tribute to Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, who was deeply inspired by the poet. Nehru, apart from being a humanist, statesman and founding father of Indian democracy, was a prodigious writer with a deep sense of history.
Nehru was a lover of poetry and nature, and he invariably spent his vacations in the awesome beauty of the Himalayan mountains, riding horses and exploring the woods. No wonder he found in Frost a kindred soul, whose intimacy with nature, universal themes with depth and complexity, and exploring topics that resonate across time and cultures, appealed to him. Frost’s meditations on life, nature, and human limitations offered profound insights to Nehru.
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As Jay Parini, poet and Frost’s eminent biographer, and Middlebury College Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing, says, “He cuts across the class system in America and he speaks to both the........