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. That just won’t wash, not when you actually read the words carefully.Īccording 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). Everyone else hightailed it down the popular road but me, individualist that I am, I took the less popular road, and it turned out darn well. The common understanding, Orr tells us, is that the poem is about staunch individualism. It'll take a pretty determined individualist to take this road that's not been travelled in a looong time. It’s by David Orr, poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review, and is an excerpt from a book he’s devoted to that one poem.
#Mood of the road not taken full#
So I read the posted snippet, which was about “The Road Not Taken” – I’ve read that one, I think, said I to myself, but it’s not the one about miles to do until we eat? pray? love? one of those basic things – and then followed the link the full article, which is in the Paris Review. This post had an intriguing title: “The Most Misread Poem in America”. But then who knows what really goes on in the minds of those kindly uncles, eh? He’s sort of the Walt Disney of American poetry, him and Carl Sandburg, but apparently Frost had a nasty side as well.
I, being an American citizen in good standing, know a bit about Frost.
After I’d sat myself down at my computer on Tuesday morning, and after I’d checked in at my blog, New Savanna, and at Facebook, I zoomed here to 3QD, as I often do, and saw a link to an article about a Robert Frost poem.
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