The Road Not Taken

One of the most recognized and often quoted poems in 20th-century American poetry, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” (1915) celebrates the strength of individuality and the heroic decision to take control of life. The poem offers a simple narrative moment: A man, walking a path in the woods, comes to a fork in the road, and he decides which path to take. Indeed, the poem, with its apparent hyper-serious tone and preachy didacticism, has become a staple in commencement addresses, as it seems to demand turning away from the herd and following the heart’s inclinations despite any misgivings.

The poem, however, is deceptively simple. A major expression of Modernism, in which a generation of daring and uncompromising poets, centered in England, recast the nature of poetry itself through a subtle use of irony that infused their verse with an alarming sense of anxiety and spiritual crisis, the poem resists making heroic the assertion of choice in life and suggests in fact that such dramatic choices really have no consequences. Choice becomes meaningful only in retrospect, a measure of the ability of the mind later to refashion such impulsive decisions into something that passes for wisdom.