Robert Frost placed “The Road Not Taken” first in his 1920 collection, Mountain Interval, so it serves as kind of an epigraph to the book. On first reading, you might easily arrive at the pronouncement in the final lines and take it at face value—sincere, formal, moralistic and American, endorsing the individual’s choice to diverge from the mainstream:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—But Frost himself called this one of his “tricky” poems, and some people think that common interpretation of its conclusion is at the very least over-simplified, perhaps completely wrongheaded:
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
from The Los Angeles Times:
“The curve in ‘The Road Not Taken’,” by Brian Shott
“Quick: What do rocker Melissa Etheridge, self-help guru M. Scott Peck and troubled insurance giant AIG have in common?
Answer: A common misreading of one of America’s most famous poems.”
So what do you think Frost intended in that line about the road “less traveled by”? Is it really “a paean to American rugged individualism,” as Shott describes the misreading? Or is it more ambiguous, implying that we really cannot judge the difference between two paths at the fork in the road? Our notes and commentary will help you work your way through the twists and turns in this famous, much loved and much quoted poem—and we’d love it if you came back afterwards and told us what the poem means to you.
More on Robert Frost:
Profile of Robert Frost, American farmer/philosopher poet
Library of Poems by Robert Frost
Robert Frost Talks About Poetry
A Robert Frost poem handwritten & hidden away: “War Thoughts at Home”
Frost’s Homer Noble Farm Treated Most Ignobly
Poetical punishment for the Frost farm vandals
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