"Frost wrote the poem to tease his chronically indecisive friend, Edward Thomas, who misinterpreted the meaning and enlisted in the military shortly thereafter,

"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