He actually anticipates his own bloviating insincerity, how he will later claim boldly that he chose the path “less travelled by” (Line 19), a manifest lie. He is certain that he will recall with a “sigh” (Line 16), an ambiguous emotional response, how when confronted by the dilemma of a fork in the road one extraordinarily ordinary morning he chose one way over the other and how that the choice has “made all the difference” (Line 20). He decides grandly, without a hint of saving irony or self-mockery, that this decision of his will become the stuff of heroic tales, recounted “ages and ages hence” (Line 27). As he gambols down the path, he is proud of his pro-active response to the crisis of a fork in the road. In the closing stanza, the hiker takes a step back and congratulates himself on his decision-making prowess. His epitaph quotes his own poem “The Lesson for Today”: “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” He was buried by his wife and five of his children in a modest grave in the rustic churchyard of the Old First Church in Bennington, Vermont. Frost continued to write until his death in Boston in January 1963, following a massive heart attack. ![]() The bravura performance cemented Frost’s international reputation as America’s Poet. ![]() Without missing a beat, he recited from memory “The Gift Outright,” a poem he published nearly 50 years earlier. Kennedy, a fellow New Englander and an avid admirer of Frost’s work, to deliver an original poem at Kennedy’s inauguration in January, 1961, the poet, then 86, could not make out the typed lines of the poem he wrote because of the glare of the sun. We want to hear what you think about this article.His verse, grounded in traditional notions of careful metrics and strict rhyme ( free verse, he often complained, was like playing tennis without the net), was at once accessible and conversational and yet philosophically profound, even unsettling. It is now widely considered to be one of the most popular works of American literature. “The Road Not Taken” was originally published in The Atlantic in 1915 along with two other poems from Frost. ![]() ![]() It’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.” In the final stanza, we can’t know whether the speaker is sighing with contentedness or regret as he justifies the choices he’s made and shapes the narrative of his life.įrost wrote the poem to tease his chronically indecisive friend, Edward Thomas, who misinterpreted the meaning and enlisted in the military shortly thereafter, only to be killed two years later in WWI. In fact, the critic David Orr deemed Frost’s work “the most misread poem in America,” writing in The Paris Review: “This is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices… The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism. But as Frost liked to warn his listeners, “You have to be careful of that one it’s a tricky poem-very tricky.” In actuality, the two roads diverging in a yellow wood are “really about the same,” according to Frost, and are equally traveled and quite interchangeable. This interpretation has long been propagated through countless song lyrics, newspaper columns, and graduation speeches. Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” is often interpreted as an anthem of individualism and nonconformity, seemingly encouraging readers to take the road less traveled.
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