IN JUNE 1965, to protest the escalation of the Vietnam War and the sending of American troops to the Dominican Republic, Robert Lowell declined an invitation to Lyndon B. Johnson's White House Festival of the Arts in a public statement that was covered on the front page of the New York Times. In August it was reported that LBJ met with college students on the White House lawn and “invoked the poet Robert Lowell”:

In his biography of Lowell, Ian Hamilton commented on this episode dismissively, calling it a “comic postscript” to Lowell's act of protest, speculating that “Johnson's speech writer, in a hurry to supply an upbeat quote, had not adventured past the title page.” Lowell himself wrote of the incident in a letter to Stanley Kunitz on August 16, 1965: “Wasn't the Dover beach grotesque? Some one from the Times called me at eleven thirty after a party and asked me if the lines were mine. All I could think of were the words ‘world’ and ‘before’ and I said, ‘Oh no, they are by John Milton.’”