Recall the poem’s conclusion: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” These are not only the poem’s best-known lines, but the ones that capture what most readers take to be its central image: a lonely path that we take at great risk, possibly for great reward. The difficulty with “The Road Not Taken” starts, appropriately enough, with its title.
(There is no evidence that Frost ever contemplated doing so, in agony or otherwise.) Lyrics that are especially lucid and accessible are sometimes described as “critic-proof” “The Road Not Taken”-at least in its first few decades-came close to being reader-proof. Instead, he frequently told an idealized version of the story” in which, for instance, Thomas said, “What are you trying to do with me?” or “What are you doing with my character?” One can understand Frost’s unhappiness, considering that the poem was misunderstood by one of his own early biographers, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant (“Thomas, all his life, lived on the deeply isolated, lonely and subjective ‘way less travelled by’ which Frost had chosen in youth”), and also by the eminent poet-critic Robert Graves, who came to the somewhat baffling conclusion that the poem had to do with Frost’s “agonized decision” not to enlist in the British army. As Thompson writes, Frost “could never bear to tell the truth about the failure of this lyric to perform as he intended it.
#THE ROAD NOT TAKEN PICTURE SERIES#
Yet even Thomas needed explicit instructions-indeed, six entire letters-in order to appreciate the series of double games played in “The Road Not Taken.” That misperception galled Frost. I doubt if you can get anybody to see the fun of the thing without showing them & advising them which kind of laugh they are to turn on.”Įdward Thomas was one of the keenest literary thinkers of his time, and the poem was meant to capture aspects of his own personality and past. 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, hypocritical for the fun of the I don’t suppose I was ever sorry for any thing I ever did except by assumption to see how it would feel.”Ħ. Thomas responds on July 11, 1915: “You have got me again over the Path not taken & no mistake. In the spring of 1915, Frost sent an envelope to Edward Thomas that contained only one item: a draft of “The Road Not Taken,” under the title “Two Roads.” According to Lawrance Thompson, Frost had been inspired to write the poem by Thomas’s habit of regretting whatever path the pair took during their long walks in the countryside-an impulse that Frost equated with the romantic predisposition for “crying over what might have been.” Frost, Thompson writes, believed that his friend “would take the poem as a gentle joke and would protest, ‘Stop teasing me.’”ĥ. Frost writes back on June 26, 1915: “Methinks thou strikest too hard in so small a matter. “The Road Not Taken” has confused audiences literally from the beginning. Would be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark.įorward, you understand, and in the dark.įROST TO LEONIDAS W. Set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless.Įver since infancy I have had the habit of leaving myīlocks carts chairs and such like ordinaries where people My poems-I should suppose everybody’s poems-are all
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