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

David Orr

Aug 2015 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

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 straightforward: a nameless traveler is faced with a choice: 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.

Ratings and reviews

"Robert Frost Exposed" by Giuseppi Martino Buonaiuto Robert Frost: a mediocre poet. Robert Frost: a mediocre poet. That’s the truth, plain, simple and plain. And I know I just said plain twice, But repeating things for spooky effect is an affliction, Suffered by almost all living boomer-generation American writers, Who’ve read “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” And while we’re on the subject: Look, I think Robert Frost is an okay poet– Nice, but just okay–not great and certainly not Poet Laureate of the United States of America caliber. That poem “Stopping …” is nowhere near great, Despite millions of scholarly words Written about it by college English professors. To me, it’s just an okay riff, Written by an okay mellow guy, Who is just out in his okay, ordinary buggy, Smoking an okay ordinary joint, Just going for an okay trip around the block. And as far as that queer horse goes . . . Well, I’m not going there.

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 his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, and The Yale Review. He holds a BA from Princeton and a JD from Yale Law School, and is a visiting professor at Cornell University.