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Let’s not kid ourselves about Frost’s “The Gift Outright.” Frost himself was dissatisfied with it, to the extent of adding the disastrous “Dedication” as a preamble. At the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, Frost feigned a visual problem at the podium and scrapped the “Dedication.” Nixon’s top hat should have solved the fake problem, but the real problem was “The Gift Outright” itself, which is not a poem at all. It is a tedious series of rambling couplets that never establish enough unity among themselves to constitute a poem.
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Not that it much matters but he's got this all wrong. The poem Frost wrote for the inauguration was entitled, obviously enough, "For John F. Kennedy's Inauguration" and was indeed a fairly undistinguished piece in couplets. However, because of snow-glare he couldn't read it and so instead recited from memory "The Gift Outright", which he had written and published back in 1942. "The Gift Outright" is unrhyming - and also highly memorable.