Jacqueline Kennedy Quotation of Robert Frost.

KENNEDY, Jacqueline [Robert Frost].

Item Number: 44052

Jacqueline Kennedy hand writes the first lines from the Robert Frost poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. From the collection of Mary Gallagher, who was the personal secretary to Jacqueline Kennedy from 1957 to 1964, which includes the Kennedy presidency. Before that, she was Senator John F. Kennedy’s secretary and worked briefly for Jackie’s mother. Robert Frost was one of President and Mrs. Kennedy’s favorite poets. He was invited to present two of his poems at the Kennedy Inauguration on January 20, 1961. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening is perhaps his best known work; and Frost himself admitted that it was “my best bid for remembrance.” Mrs. Kennedy slightly misquotes the three concluding lines, “For I have promises to keep And miles to go before I sleep And miles to go before I sleep.” Jacqueline wrote them on Mary Gallagher’s shorthand notebook in her new home in Georgetown, in 1964, where she moved to after leaving the White House. Gallagher further explains in her affidavit: “This happened to be but one of the many poems that [Mrs. Kennedy] had chosen daily from little stacks of books in which she had placed paper markers to designate the pages that had the various passages for me to type up over the next few weeks. As she explained, they were ‘for the fund-raising dinner in New York on the 16th, to be recited by Frederic March.’ The poem was recited by March at the Kennedy Library dinner and the Democratic Convention that same year. Matted and framed opposite a photograph of President and Mrs. Kennedy and Robert Frost. The entire piece measures 17 inches by 21 inches.