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robert frost goes so hard. he's very dark and people have no clue. that is an obscure reading of the text that you only pick up if you're an avid reader or engl

robert frost goes so hard. he's very dark and people have no clue. that is an obscure reading of the text that you only pick up if you're an avid reader or english major.

jldugger 2y ago
> he's very dark and people have no clue. ... is The Road Not Taken a map to where he hid the bodies?
- greenie_beans 2y ago
  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53087/out-out https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53087/out-out
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Yep. I think I've told one or two people he wrote a poem along those lines and they basically didn't believe me. Audited a course by a really good English professor on American writers/poets of that general period and it was very memorable.
alabastervlog 2y ago
What's amazing is it's not obscure. It's in the plain language of the poem—you either read it (something like) that way, or you have to, IDK, assume Frost was just so extremely sloppy or inept that he got all confused a couple times in the middle of writing this short poem but then published it that way regardless, and then also decide that the common reading (despite all the confusion and contradictions) is the one you're going with for—I can't even imagine what reason, because it's what you get if you only pay attention to the very beginning and very end of the poem, and not very close attention to those, even, I guess? The latter is ridiculous... and yet common. What this reveals is that an enormous proportion of people who can read, cannot do so at all well. This isn't like catching the multilingual puns and their significance in Finnegan's Wake, it's quite straightforward, at least insofar as it's plain that even the surface meaning is not "I in-fact took the road less traveled by, and that was good".
- LPisGood 2y ago
  A more charitable interpretation might be that most people have read this poem maybe once while half paying attention in school and they have forgotten all of the details except for the famous line and the cultural context that it usually comes with.
  - pinkmuffinere 2y ago
    I think your more charitable interpretation is also more-correct, but it is still an indictment of sorts: we’ve all read this poem, but very very few were critically paying attention to what we read. We mostly trusted our instincts, and didn’t care to double check. To be fair, I don’t think we can expect more of elementary school kids. But I think I might have read it in high school, and should have done better.
- scottyah 2y ago
  I love books with hidden little things in books, like Hofstadter's GEB where he writes messages in the first letter of each line. Not to mention the plethora of meta self-references and recursions.
- Calavar 2y ago
  I think the discrepancy comes from semantic overloading of the word "should" in "I doubted if I should ever come back." In older style English "should ever" can be interpreted as would ever happen to or would ever be able to but in contemporary English it's more likely to mean would ever want to. There are other clues for the reader of course. One path looked less worn, but in retrospect it wasn't actually less worn. He would tell the story with a sigh, which isn't something you would typically do if you were happy about it. So I agree that it boils down to most people not being very good at reading nontrivial texts. But I don't agree that that this text is totally straightforward. It's not highly complicated, but it's not everyday text either.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Th "unconventional" interpretation being discussed here isn't new. I heard it from a college English professor in probably 1982 or so. Maybe it was unconventional then. Don't know. But my sense is that it's mostly not especially controversial today. As you say it's a pretty reasonable straight reading of a not especially complex short poem. Just not a reading that speaks to how a lot of people would prefer to read it.

robert frost goes so hard. he's very dark and people have no clue. that is an obscure reading of the text that you only pick up if you're an avid reader or english major.

jldugger 2y ago

> he's very dark and people have no clue. ... is The Road Not Taken a map to where he hid the bodies?

greenie_beans 2y ago
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53087/out-out https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53087/out-out
- ghaff 2y ago
  Yep. I think I've told one or two people he wrote a poem along those lines and they basically didn't believe me. Audited a course by a really good English professor on American writers/poets of that general period and it was very memorable.

alabastervlog 2y ago

What's amazing is it's not obscure. It's in the plain language of the poem—you either read it (something like) that way, or you have to, IDK, assume Frost was just so extremely sloppy or inept that he got all confused a couple times in the middle of writing this short poem but then published it that way regardless, and then also decide that the common reading (despite all the confusion and contradictions) is the one you're going with for—I can't even imagine what reason, because it's what you get if you only pay attention to the very beginning and very end of the poem, and not very close attention to those, even, I guess? The latter is ridiculous... and yet common. What this reveals is that an enormous proportion of people who can read, cannot do so at all well. This isn't like catching the multilingual puns and their significance in Finnegan's Wake, it's quite straightforward, at least insofar as it's plain that even the surface meaning is not "I in-fact took the road less traveled by, and that was good".

LPisGood 2y ago
A more charitable interpretation might be that most people have read this poem maybe once while half paying attention in school and they have forgotten all of the details except for the famous line and the cultural context that it usually comes with.
- pinkmuffinere 2y ago
  I think your more charitable interpretation is also more-correct, but it is still an indictment of sorts: we’ve all read this poem, but very very few were critically paying attention to what we read. We mostly trusted our instincts, and didn’t care to double check. To be fair, I don’t think we can expect more of elementary school kids. But I think I might have read it in high school, and should have done better.
scottyah 2y ago
I love books with hidden little things in books, like Hofstadter's GEB where he writes messages in the first letter of each line. Not to mention the plethora of meta self-references and recursions.
Calavar 2y ago
I think the discrepancy comes from semantic overloading of the word "should" in "I doubted if I should ever come back." In older style English "should ever" can be interpreted as would ever happen to or would ever be able to but in contemporary English it's more likely to mean would ever want to. There are other clues for the reader of course. One path looked less worn, but in retrospect it wasn't actually less worn. He would tell the story with a sigh, which isn't something you would typically do if you were happy about it. So I agree that it boils down to most people not being very good at reading nontrivial texts. But I don't agree that that this text is totally straightforward. It's not highly complicated, but it's not everyday text either.
ghaff 2y ago
Th "unconventional" interpretation being discussed here isn't new. I heard it from a college English professor in probably 1982 or so. Maybe it was unconventional then. Don't know. But my sense is that it's mostly not especially controversial today. As you say it's a pretty reasonable straight reading of a not especially complex short poem. Just not a reading that speaks to how a lot of people would prefer to read it.