The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong

by David Orr

A cultural “biography” of Robert Frost’s beloved poem, arguably the most popular piece of literature written by an American

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . .” One hundred years after its first publication in August 1915, Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” is so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget that it is, in fact, a poem. Yet poetry it is, and Frost’s immortal lines remain unbelievably popular. And yet in spite of this devotion, almost everyone gets the poem hopelessly wrong.
  David Orr’s The Road Not Taken dives directly into the controversy, illuminating the poem’s enduring greatness while revealing its mystifying contradictions. Widely admired as the poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review, Orr is the perfect guide for lay readers and experts alike. Orr offers a lively look at the poem’s cultural influence, its artistic complexity, and its historical journey from the margins of the First World War all the way to its canonical place today as a true masterpiece of American literature.
  “The Road Not Taken” seems a nameless traveler is faced with a two paths forward, with only one to walk. And everyone remembers the traveler taking “the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” But for a century readers and critics have fought bitterly over what the poem really says. Is it a paean to triumphant self-assertion, where an individual boldly chooses to live outside conformity? Or a biting commentary on human self-deception, where a person chooses between identical roads and yet later romanticizes the decision as life altering? What Orr artfully reveals is that the poem speaks to both of these impulses, and all the possibilities that lie between them. The poem gives us a portrait of choice without making a decision itself. And in this, “The Road Not Taken” is distinctively American, for the United States is the country of choice in all its ambiguous splendor.

Published for the poem’s centennial—along with a new Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Frost’s poems, edited and introduced by Orr himself— The Road Not Taken is a treasure for all readers, a triumph of artistic exploration and cultural investigation that sings with its own unforgettably poetic voice.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Literature, Criticism, Biography, Literary Criticism, Essays

192 pages, Hardcover

First published August 18, 2015

About the author

David Orr is the poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review. He is the winner of the Nona Balakian Prize from the National Book Critics Circle and the Editor’s Prize for Reviewing from Poetrymagazine. Orr’s writing has appeared in Poetry, Slate, The Believer, and Pleiades magazine. He holds a B.A. from Princeton and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Reviews

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such an interesting examination of Frost's well-known poem with a view toward Frost's ideas of the individual and self, and a discussion of duality in his poetry. In addition to being an analysis of this poem, Orr provides a careful study of the poet himself and how he wrote, saw himself and his poetry, especially in relation to this particular poem. This book has given me new insights and approaches to reading Frost in the future and an increased respect for his skill and purpose. While I have always enjoyed his poetry, I will be honest in saying that I had not known of the duality present in much of it. I believe that I may have glimpsed it in "The Road Not Taken", but Orr has brought home so many new ideas using his own work coordinated with that of other scholars and poets and focusing on this beloved poem.

Well doneand recommended for poetry readers who also enjoy reading critical thought.

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

No poet, nor poetry critic, I. . .I was amazed to see that 20 lines of verse could support 172 pages of text. And that, I learned, was only one book among a multitude of books, articles and commentaries written about this deceptively simple poem by Robert Frost. David Orr, the author of this recent book about Frost's most famous poem is, among other things, the poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review and, as such, brings a wealth of knowledge to his topic.

I will readily admit that I am among the millions who have misread and misinterpreted Frost's poem since it was first penned, seeing it only superficially and failing to appreciate its complexity and ambiguity. That is one of the great values of this book to the uninitiated -- it helps one to look more deeply into the meaning of the poem. But it does not stop there and its value extends even to those quite familiar with Frost's work. To help the reader examine the poem from different angles and in a broader context, the author divides the book into four primary sections: The Poet, The Poem, The Choice and The Chooser. In the Poet, he provides a brief biography (although this book is not intended to be primarily a biography) and gives the reader a sense of Frost the person versus Frost the public persona. I suspect that this section will yield few new insights to those already familiar with Frost, but for the many, like me, who knew little about him, it lays a perfect foundation for the chapters that follow.

The next chapter, The Poem, is not a line by line analysis of the poem. Rather, it begins by explaining the poem's origin, explores what Frost has said about the poem over time, discusses how others have chosen to interpret it, and compares and contrasts elements within the poem to highlight the intentional ambiguity of the poem. It focuses on specific word choices made by Frost and analyzes the importance of each. And it draws clues to the poem's meaning from other works by Frost. While Orr may suggest at answers to the questions raised by Frost's poem, he never goes so far to propose a complete interpretation of the poem, leaving that for each reader to do for him or herself; but he gives the reader a more informed basis from which to do so.

The chapters on The Choice and The Chooser attempt to look at elements of the poem in the perspective of a broader social context. Drawing heavily on research done by various social scientists, these chapters had a bit of a Malcolm Gladwell feel to them, as Orr explores the meaning of concepts such as "choice" and "self." To me, these chapters say less about Frost and what he intended by the poem and more about why the poem has had such lasting appeal. That is, of course, a perfectly appropriate direction in which to take a book such as this, although I found it a bit jarring, coming as it did immediately after diving so deeply into the poem itself. A few stops to decompress on the way back up could help the non-scholars among us fend off the literary bends.

Being neither poet nor poem critic, there were certainly parts of this book that were either over my head or required me to go down an analytical road more intellectually arduous than I was willing to take. Nevertheless, there remained a general accessibility to Orr's work that left me feeling smarter for having read it. Moreover, since reading the book, I have gone back and reread Frost's The Road Not Taken a number of times. I have even indulged in the arrogance of coming to my own interpretation of what Frost could have meant by this intriguing poem. And that, I think, is ultimately what Orr was hoping to achieve through this book -- to get readers to understand that there is no single correct interpretation of this poem but many possible meanings, leaving the reader (dare I say it) the choice to decide which interpretation to give it.

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frost had a "typically prickly relationship" with his peers. He described Ezra Pound as trying to become original by "imitating somebody that hasn't been imitated recently."

Frost's poem gets googled more than any other poem.

It appears the poem was meant as a gentle joke for Edward Thomas. The giveaway word is "sigh." What major poet uses such a word. Apparently, Thomas missed the point. Apparently, we all do.

To be honest, the book became superb for me once the author focused on philosophy rather than poetry.

Lyrics that are "lucid and accessible" are sometimes described as "critic-proof." This poem came close to being "reader-proof."

Another interesting word in the poem is "road" rather than "path." Why that word?

But "sigh" is the key. Frost called it to Thomas "a mock sigh, hypocritical for the fun of the thing."

Let's consider the Choice:
We do NOT find:
1. Other people with him.
2. A culture influencing him.
3. Pressure on him.
4. Distractions.
5. Moral consequences.
6. Multiple options.
7. Options that lack differentiating qualities. (I don't get this one.)
8. Trivial options.
9. A choice not to choose.

How much deciding is there really in decision making? Great question. My answer is not as much as you might think. And really probably not any at all, as hard as that is to believe.

One book to read on the topic: The Myth of Choice by Kent Greenfield.

We get into the debate of free will versus determinism. Now it gets very interesting. And clearly I am on the side of determinism.

Leucippus in 5th century BCE: "Nothing comes to be at random, but everything for a reason and by necessity."

The Stoic philosopher Chrysippus: "Everything that happens is followed by something else which depends on it by causal necessity. Likewise, everything that happens is preceded by something with which it is causally connected. For nothing exists or has come into being in the cosmos without a cause."

Causal Determinism according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature."

Gazzaniga: "The concept of free will is without meaning."

The biologist Jerry Coyne asserts: "No, we couldn't have had that V8, and Robert Frost couldn't have taken the other road."

This phenomenon could be called "choice blindness." We may not understand our choices. Taking it even further with determinism: "Whatever choice we make is the only choice we could have made." Therefore, it is no choice at all. It is the type of conclusion that "so many books on choosing shy away from in their closing moments."

Scientific studies have indicated that "unconscious neural activity in the brain seems to precede our conscious awareness of having made a decision, in some cases by as much as seven seconds."

People often make the mistake of asking "Who am I?" or saying "I want to find myself." As if there were a separate self to find.

The great philosopher David Hume said, "I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying their perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change; not is there any single power of the soul, which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment. The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations."

[Kris (My Novelesque Life) · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN: FINDING AMERICA IN THE POEM EVERYONE LOVES AND ALMOST EVERYONE GETS WRONG
Written by David Orr
2015; Penguin Press (192 Pages)
Genre: poets, poetry, biography, literature review

RATING: ★★★1/2

Last night I picked up David Orr's The Road Not Taken - a slim volume of Orr's look at Frost's most popular and beloved poem. Orr divides the book looking at the Poet, the Poem, the Choice and the chooser. He argues that while audiences love this poem they seem to have the meaning behind it incorrect. Orr writes well and his arguments concise. I read it in one sitting not because I am one of those people who have loved the poem (poet) and has been reading it incorrectly. I recommend this to lovers of poetry and Frost.


Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

My Novelesque Life

[Michelle Curie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very straightforward and to-the-point analysis of Frost's infamous poem that changed the American literary landscape forever. While not as revelatory as the title suggests, it offers a thorough understanding of the poem itself, as well as the context in which it came to exist.



I was intrigued to read this after encountering Orr's knowledgeable preface to my collection of Frost's poetry. He clearly knows his subject, and I do like to learn from experts. So off I went, taking this particular road (ha!).

Orr is actually not the first to appreciate the poem's complexity, despite the title alluding to it, but I did like the systematic way he approached his analysis: we get a chapter on the poet himself, one on the poem, one on the choice, and a closer look at the chooser afterwards. Each angle adds context and helps us understand both Frost as a person and author, as well as the poem's cultural impact, especially in America. I knew very little about Frost's private life, so this laid a solid foundation for enhancing my understanding of what was to follow.

It's more ironic and ambiguous than a first read might suggest. Orr's main point is that it's not so much a celebration of individualism, but rather a more sarcastic statement: Frost wrote this partly as a joke for his friend Edward Thomas, who had a tendency to regret his decisions. So the poem mocks humans’ tendency to impose meaning after the fact. The narrator might have claimed to have travelled the road "less travelled by", when in reality, both roads were pretty much the same.

I believe this is a solid read if you know little and want to learn more on this subject: it's accessible and written in a way that doesn't require you to be a literary critic yourself to get the references and allusions. One might question whether it's necessary to stretch an analysis of twenty lines to over 170 pages, but it was a sweet companion while it lasted.

[John Cooper · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a bit bemused by this book-length--okay, it's a short book--riff on the various meanings and readings of Robert Frost's poem. About a third of it is an examination of Frost himself, and the rest takes off from that and attempts to figure out what combination of ambiguities best matches the set that Frost was trying to set in motion. David Orr is pretty sure he knows, and that a lot of other smart people (including the fellow poet whom Frost said inspired the poem) were or are wrong. I'm not competent to judge that. What I am competent to comment on is Orr's style of argument, which is verbose, complicated, and often a bit overheated, in the manner of a party guest who buttonholes you to share, at uninterrupted length, what he knows about whatever his pet obscure subject is. It's not that he's not right, but that he seems much more interested in his argument than aware of the person he's talking so intently to. This book really doesn't pause for breath. Orr is much better at short pieces like the ones collected in his You, Too, Could Write a Poem.

[Bob Schnell · Rating 2 out of 5]

David Orr's analysis of Robert Frost's most famous poem would have been more interesting to me if I enjoyed deconstructing poetry, which I do not. I picked up this book mainly because of its subtitle; I wanted to see what I didn't understand about a poem that even I knew.

To put it succinctly, the poem is not an ode to individualism (the road less traveled by) but a wistful thought to what might have been (the road not taken). There are, of course, many other interpretations explored and even individual words examined for Frost's real meaning. Was it really meant as an in-joke about his friend Edward Thomas? Or did Frost just use his friend's habit of crying over decisions not made as a jumping off point for a poem that would become one of the most famous in the world? Every possibility is explored in detail. If that is your cup of tea, you will enjoy it. If not, best to move on, whichever road you choose.

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating

Orr's freewheeling exploration of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" delves into the ambiguity of the poem. First by exploring Frost's context then by a very deep read made parallel to contemporary culture, Orr shows that ambiguity between the naive reading and the more cynical one opens the poem up for reflection on the self and choice in American life. Orr goes places one does not expect.

[Kristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This engaging and interesting critique of one of the most beloved poems is enlightening without being too academic. The second-half delves unnecessarily deeply into philosophy but circles back nicely to the central argument that the poem has been incorrectly read, taught, and used more often than not. The author is persuasive, educated, and articulate; this was a fascinating new look at the short stanzas I thought I knew so well. Highly recommended! 🍂

[Bfisher · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1915, Robert Frost mailed the draft of The Road Not Taken to his friend the English literary critic (and budding poet) Edward Thomas. Frost later said that the poem was meant to be a gentle twitting of his friend's anxieties about making choices. Supposedly, the receipt of the poem was a factor in Thomas' decision to enlist in the British army; he died in the Battle of Arras in 1917, shortly after transferring to active service in France.

Orr discusses the poet, a textual analysis of the poem itself, the choice made in the poem, and the figure of the chooser. The textual analysis of the poem is excellent, especially his commentary on the relationship between the poem and Frost's late poem, The Directive. The discussion of decision theory in the latter part of the book gets a bit far away from the poem.

[Mishehu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very thoughtful critique of a famously (and often mis- or only partly understood) poem. I confess that I myself have long held commonplace misconceptions about the meaning(s) of this poem. The book is very quick-reading, and packs a wealth of thoughtful observations. Reading it was akin to experiencing the best sort of college freshman seminar -- high praise from this reader. If you appreciate words, criticism, thinking, meaning, and the many fascinating and challenging questions that poetry gives rise to, I can't imagine you won't take pleasure in Orr's terrific book on America's 'favorite' poem.

[Christopher Renberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have always taught this particular Frost poem and apparently have taught it incorrectly. This was an utterly fascinating read. Broke down the poem in a highly enlightening way. I learned so much and now feel that I can educate my students so much more about the poem and about the author. I'm not a hardcore Frostite or Frosty or whatever his devotees are called but found much to learn. Perhaps you could as well.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Frost’s poems are beloved worldwide, but David Orr dares to unravel the conventional reading of his most famous to reveal its self-deceptive nihilism, trailing contradictions "like the wake from a battleship." Revisit this chestnut from high school, travel the roads that make all the difference as well as those that lead to more of the same, and open your mind to a new view of the poet and his least understood work. If you read only one 184-page exegesis of a twenty-line poem this year, let it be this one.

***
A role too artfully assumed ceases to be a role and instead becomes a species of identity.

One goes to the crossroads to meet the Devil, the angel who is also a monster. One goes to the crossroads to find America, the free land born in slavery. One goes to the crossroads to meet Robert Frost.

A road is an assertion of will, not an accommodation.

"I had a lover's quarrel with the world." —Frost's epitaph

When a choice is made, all other possibilities are foreclosed.

The process of choosing gives way to the fact of choice.

[S.B. Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first experience with Robert Frost and this poem was being on the receiving end of a year 12 English Curriculum. Thankfully it was delivered by someone who had an appreciation of poetry and how to impart it to 17 year old teens in the middle of Australia. While not my favourite Frost poem, The Road Not Taken was among those studied.

From that point on, despite quite liking Frost’s work, I haven’t really sat down to give The Road Not Taken,a close reading since that time. I like many others probably remember its central message as being about taking the road less travelled, about not going along with the flow.

Here it is to jog your memory or if it’s your first time, to enjoy:



The Road Not Taken



Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;



Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,



And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.



I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.



Source: The Poetry Foundation

So what do you think? Is this what the poem is about? It’s generally accepted amongst learned folk that to read it as a tribute or paean to American Individualism is a misreading of the poem and indeed some of Frost’s comments on the poem suggest that he thought folks took it too seriously. Orr’s claim :

The poem isn’t (with all due respect to can-do individualism) a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the
story of our own lives.

He then goes on at considerable but interesting length to interrogate this idea. Orr’s approach is an interesting one. First he tackles Frost himself, as the man and as the constructed national treasure. I found this section while no means a biography, a good summary of the man and how he presented himself to the public.

Frost seems to exist in the public consciousness as some sort of folksy farmer sage spreading simple home truths when the reality is perhaps more interesting and more constructed. I come away from this section of the book having great admiration for Frost’s ability to generate authenticity.

Orr then moves on to the poem itself where he kindly lets us know that the confusing nature of this poem even tripped up the good friend and poetry critic Frost based it on. Essentially though this chapter is a close reading of the poem pointing out particular word choices or lines that support if not a different meaning than the poem is assumed to have, then raising doubt in the reader’s mind. Take for example the title of the poem: The Road Not Taken. It was originally titled Two Roads but it’s frequently misremembered as The Road Less Travelled. What was Frost trying to get the reader to contemplate right from the beginning? This is perhaps my favourite section.

The book could have stopped here and still have been a worthwhile read but Orr then goes on to discuss The Choice and The Chooser in subsequent sections. The former section is a significant investigation of choice or choices, how we make decisions and quotes scientific research on the process. If this section presents an examination of the process, The Chooser examines the different selves possible/present in the poem.

Finally Orr leaves us at the Crossroads, quite literally with - Epilogue: The Crossroads. Here we are left to contemplate, perhaps deeper than we have before the nature of choice and ourselves, in that most literally liminal of places – the moment before we decide our direction.

So is the The Road Not Taken. for everyone? It’s certainly not an academic text i.e. one aimed at other academics. You’ll want to perhaps have some interest in poetry and perhaps Frost himself. That being said if you love language and literature this is such a smooth flowing and engaging read I think you’d enjoy it anyway.

This review was based on an ARC copy.

[Pat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an Advanced Reader Copy that I won in a giveaway. It will be released in mid August. I thank the publisher for this copy. My review is my honest opinion.

Who is not familiar with the poem, "The Road Not Taken", by Robert Frost. To my surprise, this poem may not be as straight forward as I initially have always believed. In this book written by David Orr, one learns about Frost the poet, and his inspiration for writing this particular poem. Did it start out as a possible goad towards a friend in England who kept worrying he did not take the right trail to find the fauna and flower specimens he wanted to show Frost?

I consider myself a lay person, when it comes to poetry. I read this poem in high school, and have since heard those last famous lines over and over in commencement speeches, church, and commercials. "Two Roads diverged in a wood, and I ---I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference."

Orr breaks down the poem and has the reader think about the possibility that taking one road is no less different than the other. Is it because by selecting the less traveled road, it makes us feel non conforming, following lofty ideals? Or, could the roads be identical and we decide that we may have missed an opportunity by not taking the other road, so we romanticize the one we picked and somehow that decision changed one's life forever. Orr suggest that this poem could be both of these decisions, impulses and neither is wrong.

Orr ascribes that you can find America in this poem. I have to agree with him.

I liked the way Orr broke it down in short chapters, The Poet, The Poem, The Choice and The Chooser.

Highly recommend for those who like poetry. This is a thought provoking book, I will most likely read again.

[Candy Wood]

This is a lovely little book, divided into four main sections and an epilogue. “The Poet” considers Frost’s biography and the process by which the real man morphed into the legend, a process that was already going on while he was alive. “The Poem” presents a detailed reading, highlighted by alternate versions so that we see what Frost might have written if he intended the meaning that so many find in the poem. For example, he could have called it “The Road Less Traveled,” as Orr says many people do. The title Frost did choose, like many of the words of the poem, allows more than one interpretation.

Orr’s point about “finding America” comes in the chapters called “The Choice” and “The Chooser.” The idea of individual choice is particularly American, demonstrated by both how-to and analytical books (best sellers, even) on decision making. Other books focus on the idea of the self, the chooser, and whether we discover or create it. Orr argues that the poem’s popularity stems partly from its expression of many of those contradictory ideas at once. The epilogue is called “The Crossroads” and points out how much that image features in Western literature, from Oedipus at the place where three roads meet until now.

Throughout, Orr’s attention to detail, humor, and examples from popular culture as well as academic sources make this whole book about one poem a joy to read. A thoroughly annotated list of further reading on Frost’s life and works comes at the end, and there’s an index.

[Liss Carmody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much more academic, and denser, than I was expecting, this slim volume delves deep into the world of poetry analysis, picking apart the text and subtext of Robert Frost's poem 'The Road Not Taken' and arguing that, rather than having deceived one or the other faction which derives warring analyses of it, the duality and contradiction is itself a central tenet of the poem. Concise chapters touch on Frost's biography and personal elements which make their way into the work, as well as discussing the neuroscience behind decision-making and choice and memory, and limnal states of being, all while relating these aspects to the poem. The final argument links the duality and emphasis on individuality to quintessential American ideals, though not always in the cliched ways one might expect. A challenging but fascinating read.

[Meghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book presents some fascinating arguments for interpreting one of Robert Frost's seminal poems, The Road Not Taken. I'd never given much thought to the opposing ways the poem could be read. David Orr explains different viewpoints based on perspectives of Frost's own life, the poem itself, the chooser, and the choice. The detail and research and alternative theories are really thought provoking. I have an all new respect for Robert Frost and The Road Not Taken (even if I now question my own choices and whether or not I actually am making choices).

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating analysis of Frost's most popular poem and all it means to both America and its various audiences. Well written, insightful, and persuasive. I haven't encountered such a good critical reading since college and now I feel an acute longing to pickup and read more poetry. Well done.

[Joseph Spuckler · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong by David Orr is a systematic critique of a poem nearly everyone knows. Orr is the poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review. He is the winner of the Nona Balakian Prize from the National Book Critics Circle and the Editor’s Prize for Reviewing from Poetrymagazine. Orr’s writing has appeared in Poetry, Slate, The Believer, and Pleiades magazine. He holds a B.A. from Princeton and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

We all have been taught to follow the road less traveled if we want to be successful, to get ahead, to live a life adventure and prosperity. Our teachers and parents told us this and it was written by one of America's great poets.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

How could this advice possibly be wrong. I thought about this and reread poem again and again. What was actually written in the poem and what we have taken from the poem are two different things. It is a twenty line poem and we take from it only the last three lines with the assumption that it must be a summary of the entire poem. In fact, it's not. Much like the Indian parable of the five blind man and the elephant, we only listen to one blind man to form our decision.

In summary: A man walking in a forest comes to a fork. Which fork to take. One has underbrush. The other is grass. They are both equally traveled. He chooses the grass. Years later his future self will recall the incident and with a sigh and a stutter, say he took the road less traveled and it made all the difference. The last three lines do not seem to accurately summarize the event.

Orr takes the reader through a short biography of Frost to include his created image of a Yankee farmer and the spirit of American individualism. His public image much like the last three lines of the poem does not live up to the reality of the situation. Frost was not much of a farmer, and he traveled to England to get his work published in something more substantial than a chicken raiser’s magazine. He met and befriended Edward Thomas, who took a liking to Frost's work. Frost and Thomas would take long walks through the forests and Thomas always hesitated and second-guessed decisions when choosing a path. After Frost returned to America in 1915 he wrote a draft of his famous poem. The poem's original title was "Two Roads" and he sent it Thomas, as a joke, playing on Thomas’ indecisiveness. Thomas did not catch the joke and thought it was exemplary.

The poem was more than just a joke, however, it became one of the most quoted poems in America. It also goes deeper as Orr shows the reader. Orr makes a note of one reviewer (Kathryn Schultz) calling the poem “The Path Not Taken.” It is a common mistake. You do not have to be a trail runner like Schultz to know that the woods contain paths and trails and not roads. Orr claims that this is deliberate. Roads are man-made and lead to a specific place, unlike many trails. Why doesn’t Frost’s traveler consider the destination when following a road? Why doesn’t he consider what most people would -- the distance, the effort needed, and the destination? His only concern was which was more traveled, and they are both equally traveled.

The examination of the poem brings to question several items that are clearly visible in the poem. The traveler does not reflect on his choice, but the opposite. He sees his future self talking about this seemingly trivial decision. He sighs -- sarcastically? He stutters on the word “I” like he is trying to quickly think of why he chose the path he did. He creates a reason that is different from what he observes on the road and makes it out to be much more than what it was.

Orr, a lawyer, tears apart the poems and like a lawyer, examines detail and shows, much like a TV defense lawyer, that what we thought happened certainly did not occur as we perceive it. Orr does this by examining the poem, the writer, the history, and the philosophy. I did not take his thesis too seriously until I reread the poem and discovered that there is much more to it than the last three lines. Orr’s research is very good and his explanations are clear and well presented. His depth of coverage is much deeper than what I presented here in my own summary in the fifth paragraph. Moreover, it’s rare that book makes the reader rethink something they believed their entire life and that is so well known in our culture and shows it to be wrong. Even the poem’s title is a bit misleading. All the difference is made from taking the road less traveled, then why is the poem titled after the road not taken?

Poetry is written to make us think. Once we take something for granted, on the word of others, the poem no longer holds it value as a poem and becomes something of a cliche. A friend with an English Ph.D. perhaps summed this up the best when she said, “Every thoughtful reading is legitimate.” That, perhaps, is what is needed of everyone -- Read, think, form opinions, support those opinions, but most of all investigate.

[Ronnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very interesting analysis of "The Road Not Taken." I had heard David Orr on the Diane Rehm show, so I was familiar with his well-supported interpretation of the poem.

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who would think there is so much to think about in this short poem! I loved this deep dive.

[Jimgosailing · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m glad I came across this book; I agree with Orr’s premise that this poem is misunderstood (and have thought this for some time). My take was that it dealt with an existential aspect: that no matter which path the traveler chose (and I agree with Orr: the poem clearly states there is no difference between the two paths), if he came back the next day to take the other path, the journey would not be the same because he would have changed since yesterday.

And Orr, below, brings out further nuances and contradictions.

Orr:
“According to Google, then, “the road not taken”
was as of mid 2012 at least four times has searched as the central text of the modernist era—the waste land— and at least 24 times has searched this the most anthologize poem by Ezra Pound. By comparison this is even greater than the margin by which the term ‘college football’ beats ‘archery’ and ‘water polo.’ given frost’s typically prickly relationships with almost all of his peers (he once described Ezra pound as trying to become original by ‘imitating somebody that hasn’t been imitated recently.’), one can only imagine the pleasure that this means would’ve brought.”

Orr points out that “the road not taken” and “frost” has more searches than “like a Rolling Stone” and “Dylan” more than “The great Gatsby” and “Fitzgerald” and more than “death of the salesman” and “Miller” and more than “psycho” and “Hitchcock.” the results are even more impressive when you consider that “the road not taken”, is routinely misidentified as “the road less traveled,”thereby reducing the search volume under the poems actual title….
“on a Word for Word basis it may be the most popular piece of literature of written by an American
And almost everyone gets it wrong. This is the most remarkable thing about ‘the road not taken’ Not It’s an immense popularity, which is remarkable enough, but the fact that it is popular for what seems to be the wrong reasons.
It’s worth pausing here to underscore a truth so obvious that is often taken for granted: most widely celebrated artistic projects are known for being essentially what they purport to be. ‘white Christmas’ in December…. Joyce’s Ulysses about a journey around Dublin…

frost’s poem turns this expectation on its head. most readers consider ‘the road not taken’ to be a paean to triumphant self assertion. (‘I took the one less traveled by’), but the literal meaning of the poems lines seem completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem’s speaker tells us he ‘shall be telling’ at some point in the future of how he took the road less traveled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths ‘equally lay’ /In leaves’ and ‘the passing there / had worn them about the same.’

so the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.
According 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), 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.

Frost is the only major literary figure in American history with two distinct audiences, one of which regularly assumes that the other has been deceived. The first audience is a relatively small and consists of poetry devotees… for these readers frost is a mainstay of syllabi and seminars, and a regular subject of scholarly articles, (though he falls as well short of inspiring the interest that Ezra pound and Wallace Stevens enjoys). He’s considered bleak, dark, complex, and manipulative; a genuine poet’s poet, not historical artifact like Longfellow or a folk balladeer like Sandburg.
Then there is the other audience. This is the great mass of readers at all age levels who can conjure a few lines of ‘the road not taken’ and ‘stopping by woods on a snowy evening’…. and who think of frost as quintessentially American in the way that Amber waves of grain are quintessentially American. to these readers (or so the first audience often assumes) he isn’t bleak or sardonic, but rather a symbol of Yankee stoicism and countrified wisdom….

In all of American history, the only writers who can match or surpass him are Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe, and the only poet in the history of the English language verse who commands more attention is William Shakespeare.
this level of recognition makes poetry readers uncomfortable. if one becomes popular than either he must be a second tier, talent catering to mass taste (as Sandberg is often thought to be) or there must be some kind of confusion or deception.

The poem is emblematic. just as millions of people know its language about the road ‘less traveled’ without understanding what the language is actually saying, millions of people recognize its author without understanding what the author was actually doing.

But this is a view of “the road, not taken”and its creator entirely accurate? poems, after all, aren’t arguments—they are to be interpreted, not proven, and that process of interpretation admits a range of possibilities, some supported by diction, some by tone, some by quirks of form structure. It’s certainly wrong to say that the road not taken is a straightforward and sentimental celebration of individualism. This interpretation is contradicted by the poems lines. Yet it’s also not quite right to say that the poem is merely a knowing literary joke, disguised as a shopworn magazine verse that is somehow managed to fool millions of readers.

There is no point in trying to explain away the general misreadings of “the road not taken” as if they were a mistake encouraged by a fraud. The poem is and isn’t about individualism, and it both is and isn’t about rationalization….it is a poem about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like it’s author, never makes a choice itself—that instead repeatedly returns us to the same enigmatic, leaf-shadowed crossroads.

In this, it has a distinctly American flavor. American culture foregrounds the issue of choice itself, regardless of the results. Captain Ahab……Huckleberry Finn… Casablanca…
It’s a way of thinking that flows naturally from the United States earliest history here is John Adams writing into John Taylor in 1814:
‘liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality and attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance…The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil’

We want to believe that roads are taken (or not) by a ‘self-determining’ power that can ‘elect between objects,’ as Adams puts it. indeed, the nation’s founding assertion that everyone is entitled to the ‘pursuit of happiness’ assumes that a path can be chosen that will make that pursuit possible

It is perhaps ironic, then, that “the road not taken” was written in England, and inspired by the indecisiveness of an Englishman…the poet, Edward Thomas…’even the most successful of these walks, failed to satisfy Thomases fastidiousness. He blamed himself for having made the wrong choice of location and would sigh wistfully over the lovely specimens that he might have shown if only he had taken Frost to a different place.’

There is no satisfying parallel American literature for the rapidity of Frost’s ascent, given the lateness of his first recognition. It’s the kind of phenomenon for which the cliché ‘meteoric rise’ is barely adequate. (by contrast, Wallace Stephens, who was born within five years of Frost, didn’t arrive at his canonical position until having seen his reputation rise for decades with the stately inevitability of a hot air balloon.) Frost went almost immediately from being nobody to being not just somebody but somebody who other somebodies might want to court.

Major poets generally have two or more strong periods over a span of decades—for instance, thirty-three years passed between the publication of Wallace Stevens’s best known poem, ‘The Snow Man,’ and the highly regarded poems gathered under the title The Rock in his Collected Poems in 1954.

In frost view, the ‘sound of sense’ to be found in great poetry was actually distinct from words as such, which can often express the opposite of their own semantic definition. Most of us understand this idea intuitively. we all know that the word ‘right’ can be said in many ways to mean many different things some of them very far from anything one would find in the dictionary. (‘I’m sure you forgiven me by now.’ ‘Riiiiiight.’). and of course, poetry relies to an extent of the indeterminacy of language, but frost writing seems not merely to rely on this indeterminacy, but to heighten and celebrate it. ‘all the fun’s in how you say a thing,’ as he writes in “the mountain.” and it’s telling that the fun is in how you ‘say’ a thing rather than how you ‘write’ a thing. If frost believe that poetry’s strength lies in its ability to convey multiple meanings simultaneously, then he was equally committed to the idea that this ability depends on taking the rhythms of every day speech as a model for poetic expression. we hear the essence of a poem, He believed, in the way that we hear ‘voices behind a door that cuts off the words.’
it’s a lovely image that at first seems almost modest: A frost poem won’t make a tempt to make a grand statement like The Waste Land, but merely to capture the homely contours of the human voice, for going elevated addiction in favor of an affect that ‘principally has to do with tone’.

[Cole Di Carlo · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of those books that you want to read as much as you can at every available moment. I already love poetry so I don’t know if this is a 5-star for everyone, though I’m confident almost everyone at least loves THIS poem and would therefore throroughly enjoy this book.

Favorites
- Searches for this poem, circa mid-2012, were so much more than any other modern poem it was larger than comparing searches for “college football” to “archery” or “water polo.”
- “The poem isn’t a solute to ‘can do’ individualism, it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.”
- “...his difficulties now had the weightier, less romantic character that comes with middle age and its subtle diminishments.”
- “...and it is [T.S.] Elliot’s ambition, with its concomitant assumption, that poetry should not only be difficult but look difficult.”
- The Waybury Inn still has a suite dedicated to Robert Frost.
- "The difficulty with 'The Road Not Taken' starts, appropriately enough, with its title. 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. So vivid is that image that many simply assume the poem is called 'The Road Less Traveled."
- "We know that Frost had originally titled the poem 'Two Roads,' so renaming it 'The Road Not Taken' was a matter of deliberation."
- "Frost seems to have deliberated chosen the word 'road.' In fact, on one occasion when he was asked to recite his famous poem 'Two Paths Diverged in a Yellow Wood,' Frost reacted with such feeling, 'Two Roads,' that the transcription of his reply made it necessary both to italicize the word 'roads' and to follow it with an exclamation point."
- The traveler isn't sorry he can't travel both roads, but that he lacks the capability to see what's at the end of each road.
- It's important to keep in mind the choice for the word "road," as neither "path" or "trail" give the same visual nor imply the sense of destination.
- The sigh is likely a mock sigh, not a demonstration that the road was hard and the author is catching their breath, but an exacerbation of what might have been missed on the other road.
- The decision being made between the two roads is not a large decision in the author's life, but just another decision in life. Unknowing of the ramification of this or any other decision till much later, choosing the road is a decision in the moment such as which shirt to wear or what music to listen to on the drive to work.
- "Choice" has become a huge interest to audiences, though especially so to American audiences. Pew Research Center, 2002, did a study that determined that 82% of the USA, tied with the Czech Republic, believes peoples' failures are because of the individual and not of societal factors.
- Known as the "Jam Study," it was found that people would purchase more jam if there were less flavors. The plethora of choices has actually led to discontentedness.
- "We are living...in an age of choice. Yet it can also seem like a limitation. Consider a service like Amazon.com. Surely, there have never been more digital cameras, running socks, spatulas, and facial moisturizers placed simultaneously before more people, in more places, in the history of humanity. But because of...algorithms...the choices for us in the future become increasingly narrow."
- Amazon has actually patented a program called "Anticipatory Shipping" based on choices we haven't even made yet.
- "'Without the possibility of choice, and the exercise of choice,' said Thomas Jefferson, 'a man is not a man, but a member, an instrument, a thing.'"
- "'The Road Not Taken' never mentions what the speaker finds on the path he eventually takes, instead the poem concludes by echoing its opening line, 'Two roads diverge in a wood,' as if to return us to the forest in which we started. What matters most, the poem suggests, is the dilemma of the crossroads. That dilemma has a long-standing part in the Western tradition."

[Kok Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Six blind men touch an elephant. One touched its tail and said an elephant felt like a rope. The other called it a spear ‘cause he touched the tusk. The rest shared their various interpretation of what this gigantic animal feels like to them. Neither of them are wrong, but none are truly right, for one, we’ve been getting the title of the world famous poem wrong.

It’s not enough to define an elephant by its tail-end, and thinking the last stanza of Robert Frost’s poem is all there is to it is nothing more than a misconception. “Even accomplished critics routinely refers to the poem by its most famous line (a.k.a. The Road Less Travelled)”, the author would say. Introducing the four-stanza poem in full during the Introduction is more than a necessity to start a poem commentary with. It’s a desperate call for humanity to lessen our misunderstandings of it.

Robert Frost writes like a “men speaking to men”, quoting Wordsworth, so if you can read the daily newspaper, you can immediately understand why this poem is half-understood. Why he writes this way (lacking in “poetic rhetoric”) is explored in other books, but you could get a few clues from going through his life story that David Orr has condensed for us. Frost’s writing philosophy is accompanied with excerpts from his private letters to his many literary peers and publishers, each revealing a unique part of Frost’s self – the poet who wants to “get outside the circle to reach the general readers” and strives to “write with the ear on the speaking voice”; the poet who performs poetry and impressed most with “inexpressible gentleness, with humor and strength and whimsical sincerity”. We see how he saw himself, we see how others saw him. And we also see why President Kennedy selects him to read at his presidency inauguration.

First half of the book tells us what the poem is, and the second half tells us that the poem deserves its status as the most famous American poem. If that sounds fluffy to you, then prepare for a dive into philosophy and the psychology behind decision-making. Are we truly conscious of our deliberations, or are we affirming our choices in retrospect? Are we in full control of our directions, or are we oblivious of the cultural influences that has made us who we are? While Orr makes vivid references to scientific journals, he weaves in interview quotes and other poems from Frost to guide the readers. As the book debates over the self as a journey of discovery or creation, the reader would need to read delicately to appreciate why making a choice can be deep yet so simply written.

The Poet, the Poem, the Choice, the Chooser. Maybe it’s less of the roads ahead but within our “self” that the occasion calls for. The reading experience is a reminder of that.

[Trevor Seigler · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood" - arguably the most famous line in American poetry, these words come from the start of Robert Frost's most famous poem "The Road Not Taken." If you've ever sat through a graduation ceremony, odds are you've heard someone invoke these lines or the famous ending "and that has made all the difference" (about taking the less-traveled road) and thought that you understood what the poem was about. This book makes a very convincing argument that you may not have.

"The Road Not Taken" by David Orr is a fantastic look at the poem that has probably been more misinterpreted than any other in American life. Usually held up as an argument for self-reliance, determined individualism, and other such hoary notions, "The Road Not Traveled" as a poem actually has its roots in the friendship Frost had with Edward Thompson, an editor he met while living in England in the years 1912 to 1915. As Orr shows, Frost may have been amused by Thompson's apologetic behavior every time they took a nature walk and Thompson felt like they'd taken the wrong road and missed the good stuff. Also at play is the notion of crossroads and how we decide which path we take and why. After all, as Orr highlights, both of the roads that Frost's narrator encounters seem equally worth a trip (indeed, it's hard to distinguish which one is "the less-traveled" one), so that we don't really know why the narrator chooses the path that he does.

Orr talks about how the narrator of the poem never really reveals why taking one road over the other "made all the difference" or even what the narrator encountered on his chosen path. Frost either leaves it up to the reader's imagination or damn well knows why his narrator chose the path, but doesn't spill the beans about it to the reader. Orr also goes over Frost's life in brief, leading up to the poem that would make him an immortal in the eyes of many critics and poetry readers (and his life up until the poem's publication was complicated and often sad). For a brief book (under two hundred pages), Orr manages to pack in a lot about American history, self-help literature, Frost's ups and downs in life, and literary analysis.

This is the kind of deep literary analysis that I love to read (what can I say? I am forever an English major at heart), and I enjoyed this a lot. Also, it's the fiftieth book that I've read this year, reaching my goal of 50 books to read this year. And it's early May...so yeah, I got a lot more time to read well past 50 (my goal last year was 200, and I went seven books over that). So there's no telling how many I'll end up reading this year.

[Danielle Routh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ironically, Orr's discussion of the poem itself is the weakest part of this book. Despite the dichotomy of interpretation as presented by Orr (earnestness vs. tongue-in-cheek), I don't think he ever quite hits on the correct meaning of the final stanza:

"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

Much is made of the "sigh" and repetition of "I," but Orr never quite realizes what I have always understood as the meaning: the narrator is "telling this" to someone else, so what actually happened is moot, even irrelevant. The sigh is comic; the "I" repetition arrogant. The road actually traveled, the result of it--neither matters. The narrator is far more concerned with convincing others that it did matter. (At least, this has always been my interpretation.)

Overall, it's a fun and witty read, divided into four parts: The Poet, The Poem, The Choice, and The Chooser. "The Poet" is exceptionally fun with a lighthearted (and honest!) look at Frost, and the latter two sections explore why the poem has resonated so deeply within American society. I'm keeping this one to read again, but I just found it amusing that Orr himself seems to, along with almost everyone, get the poem wrong.

[John Fredrickson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Road Not Taken is a poem that everyone is familiar with, but which "almost everyone gets wrong", as this book's subtitle indicates. This book opens by discussing the cultural ubiquity of this poem (used in car advertisements, graduation ceremonies, etc.), and then moves on to a close reading of the poem itself. More careful reading of the poem quickly debunks the shallow understanding of it that is so prevalent.

The latter part of this book is very curious. In the course of making his argument about the nature of what the poem expresses, Orr gets into very philosophical discussions of the nature of the 'self'. He dives deeper into this than one would normally expect, given that the book is ultimately centered around a single poet, and (mostly) a single poem. From this philosophical discussion of the 'self-ish' nature of choice, Orr then looks at individuality and choice from the standpoint of nationalistic cultures.

I very much enjoyed this book, though it did feel somewhat like 2 mini-books sandwiched together, one on Frost and his famous poem, and one on the nature of choice with respect to (American) culture.

[Lindsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Orr takes up Frost's most famous poem and explores the dichotomy between the popular interpretation of the poem (individualistic paean) and the academic interpretation (dark and manipulative): "It is a poem about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like its author, never makes a choice itself--that instead repeatedly returns us to the same enigmatically, leaf-shadowed crossroads" (12).

But this book isn't really about Frost's poem. Instead it's an examination of the American ethos using Frost's poem as a kind of metaphor . . . while examining Frost's biography and acceptance to popular audiences vs. academic (and attempting to redeem Frost from so often being called a "monster"); a little pop science; a little neuroscience; a meditation on free will; a discussion of Bush/Iraq, self-help literature, and "the self." So the book is more about how Frost's poem is emblematic of him and the American ethos than about the poem itself. Not quite what I expected but interesting in its own way.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this book to read more about the relationship of Frost to the English critic and poet Edward Thomas, who died during the first World War. I'd been running across Thomas in other books I recently read, and was intrigued. The close friendship between the men speaks to the poem's subject (choice). The choice is what Orr explores, and how the poem can be interpreted in several ways. What strikes me about this is how the poem -whether is viewed romantically or ironically - seems to lend itself to people feeling somehow the road taken is a triumphal choice. I never read it that way. To me the choice seemed lonely - not optimistic and individualistic but rather the choice of an introvert. And so it seems more closely aligned to Thomas as such. Orr's points are interesting, and I agree the poem is strong for the sly ways it can be read in different ways, But some of the impact of choice might look odd to a physicist who is interested in multiverses. The recent book The Names explores choice as being layered in that way. So this is thought-provoking but ....