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> The road less traveled Did you know the way that we commonly interpret this poem is actually the opposite of how Frost intended it? The article I quote below

> The road less traveled Did you know the way that we commonly interpret this poem is actually the opposite of how Frost intended it? The article I quote below makes the assertion that this poem is one of the most popular yet misunderstood poem of all time: "This is the most remarkable thing about “The Road Not Taken”—not its immense popularity (which is remarkable enough), but the fact that it is popular for what seem to be the wrong reasons. Most widely celebrated artistic projects are known for being essentially what they purport to be. [...] When we read Joyce’s Ulysses, we correctly assume that it’s a complex story about a journey around Dublin as filtered through many voices and styles. A cultural offering may be simple or complex, cooked or raw, but its audience nearly always knows what kind of dish is being served. Frost’s poem turns this expectation on its head. Most readers consider “The Road Not Taken” to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion (“I took the one less traveled by”), but the literal meaning of the poem’s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem’s speaker tells us he “shall be telling,” at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths “equally lay / In leaves” and “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable. According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ages and ages hence” that his decision made “all the difference” only because 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 (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. “The Road Not Taken” may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheep’s clothing." [1] [1] https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misread-poem-in-america/ https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misr...

ghaff 6y ago
I'm not sure how widespread the agreement about the alternate interpretation is. (I've never seen anything where Frost himself stated how he intended the poem to be taken.) But I've always tended to believe it since hearing it from an English professor of mine back in school.
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  "Frost 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." Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/555959/robert-frost-road-not-taken/ https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/555959/robert-frost-... -- "Asked by Richard Poirier about Thomas (in an interview conducted in 1960, i.e. fortythree years after Thomas’ death), Frost said they found fellowship in isolation and in their “instinct against belonging” to literary crowds, specifically the one centered on Ezra Pound, a devil’s name to conjure with in 1960. This included, which is a fact of relevance here, T.E. Hulme, about whom Frost was carefully, cagily, discreet [Poirier et al 876; the passage is quoted in Orr, 153-54]. We know also from letters in the early-1920s that Frost was ambivalent about Siegfried Sassoon – Louis Untermeyer, for example, irritated him by his lauding of Sassoon and dispraise of Thomas. Hulme and Sassoon were of the Tory landowner type Frost considered the worst of Englishmen, but both displayed unusual bravery. In Sassoon this was linked very publicly with his determination to give the lie to traditional structures of English authority. This was another world Thomas, an inveterate tracer of the lines and demarcations of rural England, haunted the margins of; these were standards by which he could feel himself judged and Frost likely could not help but judge him. To make a decision like Thomas’ decision to enlist is to ‘prove’ in a double sense: to elect to undergo trials in which one’s metal will be tested; and to assert an identity that, the trial not undertaken, will continue to be frayed by self-recrimination and regret. After Thomas’ death Frost, grieving, denied that he had had a hand in it. I believe he was being disingenuous, albeit in circumstances that make me not want to press the case further than I have pressed it here." https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/83078845.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/83078845.pdf
mrgordon 6y ago
Thanks for sharing this piece
deleted 6y ago
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ghaff 6y ago

I'm not sure how widespread the agreement about the alternate interpretation is. (I've never seen anything where Frost himself stated how he intended the poem to be taken.) But I've always tended to believe it since hearing it from an English professor of mine back in school.

bergstromm466 6y ago
"Frost 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." Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/555959/robert-frost-road-not-taken/ https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/555959/robert-frost-... -- "Asked by Richard Poirier about Thomas (in an interview conducted in 1960, i.e. fortythree years after Thomas’ death), Frost said they found fellowship in isolation and in their “instinct against belonging” to literary crowds, specifically the one centered on Ezra Pound, a devil’s name to conjure with in 1960. This included, which is a fact of relevance here, T.E. Hulme, about whom Frost was carefully, cagily, discreet [Poirier et al 876; the passage is quoted in Orr, 153-54]. We know also from letters in the early-1920s that Frost was ambivalent about Siegfried Sassoon – Louis Untermeyer, for example, irritated him by his lauding of Sassoon and dispraise of Thomas. Hulme and Sassoon were of the Tory landowner type Frost considered the worst of Englishmen, but both displayed unusual bravery. In Sassoon this was linked very publicly with his determination to give the lie to traditional structures of English authority. This was another world Thomas, an inveterate tracer of the lines and demarcations of rural England, haunted the margins of; these were standards by which he could feel himself judged and Frost likely could not help but judge him. To make a decision like Thomas’ decision to enlist is to ‘prove’ in a double sense: to elect to undergo trials in which one’s metal will be tested; and to assert an identity that, the trial not undertaken, will continue to be frayed by self-recrimination and regret. After Thomas’ death Frost, grieving, denied that he had had a hand in it. I believe he was being disingenuous, albeit in circumstances that make me not want to press the case further than I have pressed it here." https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/83078845.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/83078845.pdf

mrgordon 6y ago

Thanks for sharing this piece

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]