The Road Not Taken Essay

The Road Not Taken” in the United States after a career-saving sojourn in England, during which he befriended the poet and literary critic Edward Thomas. The two men took long walks together through the countryside, and Thomas would often regret aloud that he had not led them down a more attractive route, which served as partial inspiration for the poem.In the spring of 1915, Frost sent a draft of the poem—then titled “Two Roads”—to Thomas, who found the work “staggering.” But not even Thomas understood it the way Frost had intended, as correspondence between the two writers reveals.“I wonder if it was because you were trying too much out of regard for me that you failed to see that the sigh was a mock sigh, hypo-critical for the fun of the thing,” Frost wrote in a snarky note to Thomas on June 26, 1915, referring to the first line of the last stanza.The fact that there are so many readings of “The Road Not Taken” speaks not only to Frost’s strength as a poet but his desire to be misinterpreted. Frost, who died in 1963, is associated with the rustic farm life of New England, but he spent the first decade of his life in San Francisco, traveled extensively, and was more urbane than he let on (though he never graduated from college).“Frost worked incredibly hard to make it seem that he wasn’t trying hard at all,” Mr. Orr said. In England, he mingled with the likes of Ezra Pound, who was an early champion of Frost’s work, though Frost never fit completely into any one literary scene. He wanted to appeal to a wide variety of readers, which may explain why “The Road Not Taken” is so ripe for interpretation.Like most Americans, Mr. Orr doesn’t remember the first time he read the poem, though he assumes it was in high school. And yet that’s kind of beside the point. The poem is so firmly lodged in the public imagination that those who haven’t read it would probably assume that they had at some point in their lives. The same applies to a number of Frost poems, including “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and perhaps “Birches.” Few, if any, American poets could claim that.

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