The "Tricky" Poem: A Guide to Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"

• The Poem
• Notes on Form
• Notes on Content
• Commentary and Quotations: The “Tricky” Poem

On first reading, the content of “The Road Not Taken” also seems formal, moralistic, and American:

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

These three lines wrap the poem up and are its most famous lines. Independence, iconoclasm, self-reliance –- these seem the great American virtues. But just as Frost’s life was not the pure agrarian philosophe’s we imagine (for that poet, read Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym, Alberto Caeiro, especially the terrific “Keeper of Sheep”), so “The Road Not Taken” is also more than a panegyric for rebelling in the American grain.