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

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.

 

I have been teaching multiple versions of this poem for many years.  Most people are not interested in Frost’s nuance.  They use the poem for their own purposes independent of what Frost (or I ) might want.  How very American–practical and obtuse.  The truth for me is that it is a metaphoric vehicle that is flexible enough to carry livestock or diamonds. Matters not to the poem.  I do think that Frost traded quite well on his and the poem’s grandfatherly  tone only to fly in under the radar, drop its load, and fly away waggling its wings in triumph.  In complexity theory, these are called ‘attractors’ and do their best work when they allow for semi-permeable boundaries instead of brittle bright lines that “none shall pass”.  Think of the poem as attracting multiple points of view and critical stances.  While it can have an infinity of meaning, it allows forays into many different, equally plausible ‘truths’.

Gonna get my Uni library to buy this, but until then it is Interlibrary Loan for me.