Robert Lee Frost was an American poet whose work was initially published in England
before it was published in America. He was known for his command of American colloquial speech and his realistic depictions
of rural life, often in
New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes.
The Road Not Taken is one of his most popular works and was published in 1916 as the first poem in the collection
Mountain Interval. It has been said it is one
of his most misunderstood poems, claiming that it is not simply a poem
that champions the idea of "following your own path", but that the poem,
they suggest, expresses some irony regarding that idea.
Rode was a poem that was required reading in an English class I had when I was at the end of my
junior year in high school. Other than,
Roses are Red, etc., I'd had no exposure to poetry prior to reading
Rode and it opened a new world for me. Each of us in the class was required to read the poem with the phrasing each student felt while reading and it was amazing that even though the words never changed, how varied it came out at the end of each reading due to
intonation. I reflected on it during the summer break and it was one of the poems I came to love, as, by the time I returned from summer vacation for my
senior year, it inspired me to do my "own thing" a decade before it was THE "thing" to do; of course, THAT got me into trouble. Knowledge can be a dangerous thing. However, it's possible
senior year is just the time most teenagers act up. I don't know this as a fact but it might also have inspired the
counterculture hippy movement.
An alternative narrative, in fitting with the spirit of the poem, is suggested in a
New Zealand, 2008, commercial from
Ford Motor Company (
YouTube link below):
A young man hiking through a forest is abruptly confronted with a fork
in the path. He pauses and looks back and
forth between his options. As he hesitates, images from possible futures
flicker past: the young man wading into the ocean, hitchhiking, riding a
bus, kissing a beautiful woman, working, laughing, eating, running,
weeping. The series resolves at last into a view of a different young
man,
hitchhiking on the side of a road. As a car slows to pick
him up, we realize the driver is the original man from the crossroads,
only now he’s accompanied by a lovely woman and a child. The man smiles
slightly, as if confident in the life he’s chosen and happy to lend that
confidence to a fellow traveler.
According to the
Poetry Foundation (
link below), Frost wrote
The Road Not Taken as a joke for a friend, the poet
Edward Thomas. When they went walking together, Thomas was chronically indecisive about which road they ought to take and—in retrospect—often lamented that they should, in fact, have taken the other one.
photographer unknown
According to the
Paris Review (
link below) the popularity of
The Road Not Taken appears to exceed that of
every other major twentieth-century American poem, including those often
considered more central to the modern (and modernist) era.
The Road Not Taken is a
narrative
poem. It reads naturally or conversationally, and begins as a kind of
photographic depiction of a quiet moment in a woods. It consists of four
stanzas
of 5 lines each. The first line rhymes with the third and fourth, and
the second line rhymes with the fifth (a b a a b). The meter is
basically
iambic tetrameter,
with each line having four two-syllable feet. Though in almost every
line, in different positions, an iamb is replaced with an
anapest.
The variation of the rhythm gives naturalness, a feeling of thought
occurring spontaneously, and it also affects the reader's sense of
expectation.
In the only line that contains strictly iambs, the more regular rhythm
supports the idea of a turning towards an acceptance of a kind of
reality: "Though as for that the passing there … " In the final line,
the way the rhyme and rhythm work together is significantly different,
and catches the reader off guard.
There is an audio file, from this album, of Robert Frost himself reading The Road Not Taken, as well as a very funny documentary of him on YouTube (links below).
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Frost was born on March
26, 1874, and grew up in
San Francisco, California. His father was journalist William Prescott Frost, Jr. who descended from Nicholas
Frost of
Tiverton, Devon, England, who had sailed to
New Hampshire in 1634 on the
Wolfrana. His
mother, Isabelle Moodie, was a Scottish immigrant.
In 1894, he sold his first poem,
My Butterfly. An Elegy (published in the November 8, 1894, edition of the
New York Independent) for $15 ($424 today). He then went on an excursion to the
Great Dismal Swamp in
Virginia. He married Elinor Miriam White at
Lawrence,
Massachusetts, on December 19, 1895.
detail photo of album by Styrous®
Frost worked a farm his grandfather purchased for him for nine years while writing early in the mornings
and producing many of the poems that would later become famous. His farming proved unsuccessful and he returned to the field
of education as an English teacher at New Hampshire's
Pinkerton Academy from 1906 to 1911, then at the New Hampshire Normal School (now
Plymouth State University) in
Plymouth, New Hampshire.
In 1924, Frost won the first of four
Pulitzer Prizes for the book
New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes. He would win additional Pulitzers for
Collected Poems in 1931,
A Further Range in 1937, and
A Witness Tree in 1943.
In 1934, he began to spend winter months in
Florida. In 1940, he bought a 5-acre (2.0 ha) plot in
South Florida,
Florida, naming it
Pencil Pines.
Helen Muir writes, "Frost had called his five acres
Pencil Pines because he said he had never made a penny from anything that did not involve the use of a pencil. He spent his winters there for the rest of his life.
The poet/critic
Randall Jarrell praised Frost's poetry and wrote, "Robert Frost, along with
Stevens and
Eliot,
seems to me the greatest of the American poets of this century."
Jarrell lists a selection of the Frost poems he considers the most
masterful, including
The Witch of Coös,
Home Burial,
A Servant to
Servants,
Directive,
Neither Out Too Far Nor In Too Deep,
Provide,
Provide,
Acquainted with the Night,
After Apple Picking,
Mending Wall,
The Most of It, An Old Man's Winter Night,
To Earthward, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,
Spring Pools,
The Lovely Shall Be Choosers,
Design and
Desert Places.
Robert Frost entered the hospital on December 3, 1962 and underwent an operation on Dec. 10 for
removal of a urinary obstruction. Subsequently he had a heart attack and blood clots settled in his lungs; He died on January 29,
1963; he was 88 years old.
President John F. Kennedy was among
Government and literary figures who paid tribute to Mr. Frost on January 29,
1963.
New recordings of Frost readings have been discovered at Jacket2; Chris Mustazza reveals the story behind a trove of never-before-heard audio recordings of Robert Frost, which are now available at PennSound. (link below).
Ivan Massar,
who photographed Frost for the album's back cover, rose to prominence during
the 50s and 60s, the heyday of
photojournalism. On assignment and on his own behest, he documented
historical events and the daily lives of ordinary people. He embraced
life with humor, curiosity,
and warmth, and these personal gifts are reflected in his work. His
photographs endure as visual interpretations of the human
experience across cultures and time.
Tracklist:
Side 1:
A1 - The Road Not Taken
A2 - The Pasture
A3 - Mowing
A4 - Birches
A5 - After Apple-Picking
A6 - The Tuft Of Flowers; My November Guest; Acquainted With The Night; Tree At My Window
A7 - West-Running Brook
A8 - Death Of A Hired Man
Side 2:
B1 - The Witch Of Coos
B2 - Mending Wall
B3 - One More Brevity
B4 - Departmental; A Considerable Speck
B5 - Why Wait For Science; Etherealizing; Provide, Provide
B6 - One Step Backward Taken; Choose Something Like A Star; Happiness Makes Up In Height
B7 - Reluctance
Credits:
Design – Matthew Leibowitz
Painting – Ben-Zion
Photography By – Ivan Massar
Written-By, Read By – Robert Frost
Notes:
Recorded in Cambridge, Mass. - May 21, 1956.
Barcode and Other Identifiers
Matrix / Runout (A-side runout, etched): TC 1060A T1 Λ1
Matrix / Runout (B-side runout, stamped): TC 1060B-1A lll
Robert Frost – Reads His Poetry
Label: Caedmon Records – TC-1060
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album
Country: US
Released: 1957
Genre: Non-Music
Style: Poetry
Net links:
Robert Frost ~ Selected works
The Paris Review ~ The Most Misread Poem in America
Poetry Foundation ~ The Road Not Taken was a joke
Jacket Clipping ~ New Frost Recordings on PennSound
NY Times ~ Robert Frost Dies at 88; Kennedy Leads in Tribute
YouTube links:
Robert Frost ~ The Road Not Taken
PBS review ~ What we’ve gotten wrong about this Robert Frost classic Robert Frost Documentary - 1963 (40 min, 53 sec.)
The Road Not Taken Ford Motor Company commercial
"Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length."
~ Robert Frost
Styrous® ~ Monday, March 26, 2018
~
~
September 12, 1953 
