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.

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 ordinary man and woman and he speaks to the literary critic, the philosopher, the intellectual because he contains all of this in his work.” Yes, indeed, Frost’s poetry transcends time and space and has what the English romantic poet William Wordsworth called “intimations of immortality.”

The poem that affected Nehru the most was “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. Nehru had a particular fondness for this poem, which according to anecdotes from his friends and close associates, held deep meanings for him. Towards the end of his life, Nehru, troubled by health issues and the aftermath of the brutal China-Indian War (1962), kept a copy of Frost’s poems by his bedside, with the last stanza heavily underlined ~ the stanza that reads: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.” The poem resonated with Nehru on a profound level, reflecting his sense of duty and the journey he still had ahead. However, it must be mentioned that the connection between Nehru and Frost’s poetry was more private and symbolic, with Nehru finding solace and inspiration in Frost’s verses on a personal level.

This influence likely affected Nehru’s approach to leadership in a more subtle and introspective manner rather than being explicitly articulated in his political speeches. There’s another reason why Robert Frost’s poems chime with Indian sensibilities. Frost’s poetry and that of India’s Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore share similarities in their deep connection to nature and the profound emotions they evoke. Both poets, despite coming from different cultures and civilizations, envision nature vividly in their works as a source of inspiration and reflection.

Tagore perceives nature as a nurturing mother that needs to be respected and preserved, emphasizing the importance of harmony between humanity and the natural world. Similarly, Frost’s poetry often reflects a profound appreciation for nature’s beauty and the need to co-exist with it reverentially. While Frost and Tagore express their reverence for nature in distinct ways, their shared themes of nature’s beauty, its influence on human emotions, and the necessity of preserving it resonate across their works. Both poets depict natural imagery such as flowers, rivers, morning and evening scenes, stars, and more with intricate detail, creating a deep emotional connection between nature and humanity.

Frost’s poetry aligns with Tagore’s in its portrayal of nature as a source of wonder, beauty, and spiritual significance. Both poets convey an overwhelming awe for nature’s magnificence and appreciation in their poetic expressions. But poetry may have another function. After Frost recited “The Gift Outright,” at President Kennedy’s inaugural ceremony, the American leader said about the poet, “He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding. He saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations.

When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.” Nonetheless, Frost does not arrogate to himself the tall claim that his poems offer the ultimate truth or solution to life’s problems. As he says in his preface to his collected poems that “The Figure A Poem Makes,”… “ begins in delight and ends in wisdom … in a clarification of life ~ not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.”

“A momentary stay against confusion,” as literary critic Donald Pease, Geisel Professor of Humanities at Dartmouth College, explains in one of his lectures, means that Frost’s poetry exists in order to produce in the act of reading the poem the capacity within the reader to share the sudden moment of clarity which emerges from the poem. The reader is transformed by sharing the poet’s experience. That’s the joy of reading poetry. It enlightens the reader, whether he is in India or America, pondering how his karma might have changed if he had taken “The Road Not Taken.”

The writer is the author of several books including the most recent India In A New Key: Nehru To Modi. He is working on new book, Not Much Of A Democracy But There’s Nothing Like The Indian Democracy. He lives in Hartford