38 pages • 1 hour read
Robert FrostThe Road Not Taken
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1916A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Background
Historical Context
Although using a poet’s biography to provide historical context for a poem is often risky as it tends to limit the poem’s interpretation, Frost actually designed “The Road Not Taken” as a friendly jibe at a young neighbor named Edward Thomas (1878-1917), whom Frost met in Dymock when he and his wife moved into the cottage next door to Thomas and his family. Thomas yearned to be a poet, but he pursued any writing opportunities he could find that would pay, mostly travel essays and book reviews. Frost recognized Thomas’s keen ear for the music of language and encouraged him to pursue poetry during meandering walks the two would take about the Gloucestershire countryside. What irritated Frost, however, was Thomas’s habit of lingering about the paths that laced the woods trying to decide which path to follow. Thomas serves as the model for the narrator of the poem, with Frost as the overarching author(ity) finding the hiker fussy and compulsively indecisive. The poem was intended to good-naturedly poke fun at his friend’s grand Hamlet-like diddling over what was in perspective a trivial choice. The narrator ironically dismisses as wasted energy the endless dithering over alternatives.
After Frost returned to America, he sent an early draft, then titled “Two Roads,” to Thomas, assuming Thomas would get the joke. In what would presage generations of readers missing the joke, Thomas, then struggling to decide whether to join the British army to fight in the First World War or take his family and head to the safety of America, Thomas misread the poem. At least in part because of his misreading of the poem as a criticism of him and a bold call to courageously choose the more difficult and less traveled road, Thomas joined the infantry. He died just a few months later, killed by a small blast during the brutal showdown with entrenched German troops at Arras in northern France. Disturbed by what might have been his friend’s profound misreading of the poem, Frost, afterwards in public readings, would slyly caution his audience that this was a tricky little poem.
Literary Context
Frost was self-consciously and unapologetically a threshold figure, poised between the familiar and comforting wisdom poetry of the high Gilded Age/Victorian poets of his maturation and the cutting-edge experimental formalism of the emerging generation of self-styled Modernists intent on upending virtually every formal convention of poetry itself in an effort to reclaim poetry’s audacity. Born fewer than 10 years after the Civil War, Frost early on admired the careful, studied techniques, intricate aural effects, and disciplined expression of the public poets of his era, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Bryant in America and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Matthew Arnold in England, many at least by age his contemporaries. Their poetry used carefully sculpted lines, defined by clean rhythms and lyrical rhyme schemes, to explore Big Issues or share Big Stories and offer, in turn, upbeat, inspirational advice to a burgeoning middle-class market of lightly-educated readers on how best to live by drawing on a mutually agreed-upon cultural code of right behavior. By inclination a Victorian, by temperament Frost was a Modernist. Although he was more than 20 years older than the scrappy spirited rebel-poets he first met when he expatriated to England (T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, for instance, were both born when Frost was nearly 20), Frost shared if not their bold curiosity about deconstructing poetic form then certainly their complicated existentialism, their pervasive serio-comic sense of pessimism over humanity’s chances given the bleak industrial civilization they had forged and the happy drift from the purpose and meaning provided since Antiquity by religion.
Unlike the Victorians, Modernist poetry was intellectual rather than emotional, ironic rather than comforting, prickly rather than inviting, ultimately placing enormous challenges on the reader to pick up on the intricacy of the argument. Frost is at once both and neither a Victorian and a Modernist. In this, “The Road Not Taken” is an exemplum of Frost’s threshold position. He uses the inherited formal constructs of the Victorian/Gilded Age poetics to playfully mock the pretentious wisdom-poetry marketed by the same generation of poets. Come to a poem for insight, Frost invites, and depart with anything but.
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By Robert Frost
