I remember him most for that image on a cold, bright January day when he tried to read his classically American words into John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. The glare off the page made it impossible for Robert Frost to read the printed text. He put aside the copy of the poem he had written for the occasion and recited “The Gift Outright” from memory.

It was Jan. 20, 1961, a time of great optimism, a calm before the ’60s storm. Frost was one of the pieces in the carefully crafted image of Camelot. The Kennedys had arrived, and the best of the country was to be drawn into a never-ending celebration of American promise.

There might be no more fitting reminder of what happened to that promise than the remote farmhouse once owned by Frost and now owned by Middlebury College in Vermont.

One of the teenagers who participated in the vomiting, spitting, urinating defilement of that farmhouse asked a police officer if he could use his mug shot on his Facebook page.

Yes, he did. He took what qualifies as disgrace by just about any surviving standard and tried to turn it to that unique brand of self-abusive notoriety offered on the Internet. He is one Green Mountain boy who blew off any sense of shame in order to embrace the self-promoting potential of sloppy body function.

As told by Dan Barry, a wonderful writer for The New York Times who used to write for The Journal, the farmhouse was broken into recently by 30 or more young people with a half-dozen cases of beer, some liquor and drugs and total disregard for the house’s historic connections.

There were broken windows, dishes and antiques and a broken chair used for firewood. There was phlegm on hanging artwork and vomit and urine and beer just about everywhere.

There was also a glaring lack of criminal genius. State and Middlebury police had little problem rounding up the kid-vandals, who apparently had not included harsh consequences in their plans for a fun night in the woods.

The charges against the two dozen arrested include unlawful trespass and unlawful mischief. They will also have to face a lot of reminders in class at Middlebury Union High School about the poet who once recited his work for a president — and whose memory they smeared with their teenage hog wallow.

But there won’t be enough. There can’t be. The kind of gaping divide illustrated by a bunch of idiot kids dripping and drooling on an American original in the Vermont woods is not going to be bridged by group readings of “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening.” Chances are, at least half the kids would be text messaging while Frost’s words fell somewhere short of their limited attention.

It was text messaging, after all, that was used to pass the word about the sodden party at the poet’s farmhouse.

There is just too complete a disconnect. We see it all the time — in cell phones flipped into action just a few feet from someone making a presentation at the front of a classroom; in the street gangs who post their incriminating exploits online; in the girl who announces her life is over when her cell phone is taken away.

And, of course, in the falling down teenage drunk who wanted to use what should have been a very low point in his life to create a high point on Facebook.

We’re moving on separate tracks here, and there aren’t any intersections up ahead. What some see as shocking others see as a way to be a little bit famous.

And reading poetry? It’s just so quiet, and slow. And sometimes it’s really hard to tell what it means.

bkerr@projo.com