{"id":89677,"date":"2015-09-11T10:30:33","date_gmt":"2015-09-11T14:30:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=89677"},"modified":"2025-05-07T17:34:40","modified_gmt":"2025-05-07T21:34:40","slug":"the-most-misread-poem-in-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/11\/the-most-misread-poem-in-america\/","title":{"rendered":"The Most Misread Poem in America"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everyone knows Robert Frost\u2019s \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d\u2014and almost everyone gets it wrong.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Frost in 1913.<\/p><\/div>\n

From <\/em>The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong<\/a>, a new book by David Orr. <\/em><\/p>\n

A young man hiking through a forest is abruptly confronted with a fork in the path. He pauses, his hands in his pockets, 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, with his thumb out 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\u2019s accompanied by a lovely woman and a child. The man smiles slightly, as if confident in the life he\u2019s chosen and happy to lend that confidence to a fellow traveler. As the car pulls away and the screen is lit with gold\u2014for it\u2019s a commercial we\u2019ve been watching\u2014the emblem of the Ford Motor Company briefly appears.<\/p>\n

The advertisement I\u2019ve just described ran in New Zealand in 2008. And it is, in most respects, a normal piece of smartly assembled and quietly manipulative product promotion. But there is one very unusual aspect to this commercial. Here is what is read by a voice-over artist, in the distinctive vowels of New Zealand, as the young man ponders his choice: <\/p>\n

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
\nAnd sorry I could not travel both
\nAnd be one traveler, long I stood
\nAnd looked down one as far as I could
\nTo where it bent in the undergrowth;<\/p>\n

Then took the other, as just as fair,
\nAnd having perhaps the better claim,
\nBecause it was grassy and wanted wear;
\nThough as for that the passing there
\nHad worn them really about the same,<\/p>\n

And both that morning equally lay
\nIn leaves no step had trodden black.
\nOh, I kept the first for another day!
\nYet knowing how way leads on to way,
\nI doubted if I should ever come back.<\/p>\n

I shall be telling this with a sigh
\nSomewhere ages and ages hence:
\n<\/strong>Two roads diverged in a wood, and I\u2014
\nI took the one less traveled by,
\nAnd that has made all the difference.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is, of course, \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d by Robert Frost. In the commercial, this fact is never announced; the audience is expected to recognize the poem unaided. For any mass audience to recognize any poem is (to put it mildly) unusual. For an audience of car buyers in New Zealand to recognize a hundred-year-old poem from a country eight thousand miles away is something else entirely.<\/p>\n

\n

Looking for something else to read? How about \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2014 Robert\u2019s Frost\u2019s Writers at Work interview<\/a>
\n\u2014 Lucy Scholes’s column about forgotten books<\/a>
\n\u2014 A short story<\/a> by Anthony Veasna So<\/p>\n

\n

But this isn\u2019t just any poem. It\u2019s \u201cThe Road Not Taken,\u201d and it plays a unique role not simply in American literature, but in American culture \u2014and in world culture as well. Its signature phrases have become so ubiquitous, so much a part of everything from coffee mugs to refrigerator magnets to graduation speeches, that it\u2019s almost possible to forget the poem is actually a poem. In addition to the Ford commercial, \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d has been used in advertisements for Mentos, Nicorette, the multibillion-dollar insurance company AIG, and the job-search Web site Monster.com, which deployed the poem during Super Bowl XXXIV to great success. Its lines have been borrowed by musical performers including (among many others) Bruce Hornsby, Melissa Etheridge, George Strait, and Talib Kweli, and it\u2019s provided episode titles for more than a dozen television series, including Taxi<\/em>, The <\/em>T<\/em>w<\/em>i<\/em>l<\/em>i<\/em>g<\/em>h<\/em>t<\/em> Zone<\/em>, and B<\/em>a<\/em>t<\/em>t<\/em>le<\/em>s<\/em>t<\/em>a<\/em>r<\/em> Galactica<\/em>, as well as lending its name to at least one video game, Spry Fox\u2019s Road Not Taken <\/em>(\u201ca rogue-like puzzle game about surviving life\u2019s surprises\u201d). As one might expect, the influence of \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d is even greater on journalists and authors. Over the past thirty-five years alone, language from Frost\u2019s poem has appeared in nearly two thousand news stories worldwide, which yields a rate of more than once a week. In addition, \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d appears as a title, subtitle, or chapter heading in more than four hundred books by authors other than Robert Frost, on subjects ranging from political theory to the impending zombie apocalypse. At least one of these was a massive international best seller: M. Scott Peck\u2019s self-help book The Road Less <\/em>Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth<\/em>, which was originally published in 1978 and has sold more than seven million copies in the United States and Canada.<\/p>\n

Given the pervasiveness of Frost\u2019s lines, it should come as no surprise that the popularity of \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d appears to exceed that of every other major twentieth-century American poem, including those often considered more central to the modern (and modernist) era. Admittedly, the popularity of poetry is difficult to judge. Poems that are attractive to educators may not be popular with readers, so the appearance of a given poem in anthologies and on syllabi doesn\u2019t necessarily reveal much. And book sales indicate more about the popularity of a particular poet than of any individual poem. But there are at least two reasons to think that \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d is the most widely read and recalled American poem of the past century (and perhaps the adjective \u201cAmerican\u201d could be discarded). The first is the Favorite Poem Project, which was devised by former poet laureate Robert Pinsky. Pinsky used his public role to ask Americans to submit their favorite poem in various forms; the clear favorite among more than eighteen thousand entries was \u201cThe Road Not Taken.\u201d<\/p>\n

The second, more persuasive reason comes from Google. Until it was discontinued in late 2012, a tool called Google Insights for Search allowed anyone to see how frequently certain expressions were being searched by users worldwide over time and to compare expressions to one another. Google normalized the data to account for regional differences in population, converted it to a scale of one to one hundred, and displayed the results so that the relative differences in search volume would be obvious. Here is the result that Google provided when \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d and \u201cFrost\u201d were compared with several of the best-known modern poems and their authors, all of which are often taught alongside Frost\u2019s work in college courses on American poetry of the first half of the twentieth century:<\/p>\n

SEARCH TERMS\u00a0\u00a0 | \u00a0 SCALED WORLDWIDE SEARCH VOLUME<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
\u201cRoad Not Taken\u201d + \u201cFrost\u201d<\/td>\n48<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u201cWaste Land\u201d + \u201cEliot\u201d<\/td>\n12<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u201cPrufrock \u201d + \u201cEliot\u201d<\/td>\n12<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u201cThis Is Just to Say\u201d + \u201cCarlos Williams\u201d<\/td>\n4<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u201cStation of the Metro\u201d + \u201cPound\u201d<\/td>\n2<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

According to Google, then, \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d was, as of mid-2012, at least four times as searched as the central text of the modernist era\u2014The Waste Land<\/em>\u2014and at least twenty-four times as searched as the most anthologized poem by Ezra Pound. By comparison, this is even greater than the margin by which the term \u201ccollege football \u201d beats \u201carchery\u201d and \u201cwater polo.\u201d Given Frost\u2019s typically prickly relationships with almost all of his peers (he once described Ezra Pound as trying to become original by \u201cimitating somebody that hasn\u2019t been imitated recently\u201d), one can only imagine the pleasure this news would have brought him.<\/p>\n

But as everyone knows, poetry itself isn\u2019t especially widely read, so perhaps being the most popular poem is like being the most widely requested salad at a steak house. How did \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d fare against slightly tougher competition? Better than you might think:<\/p>\n

SEARCH TERMS\u00a0\u00a0 | \u00a0 SCALED WORLDWIDE SEARCH VOLUME<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
\u201cRoad Not Taken\u201d + \u201cFrost\u201d<\/td>\n47<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u201cLike a Rolling Stone\u201d + \u201cDylan\u201d<\/td>\n19<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u201cGreat Gatsby \u201d + \u201cFitzgerald\u201d<\/td>\n17<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u201cDeath of a Salesman\u201d + \u201cMiller\u201d<\/td>\n14<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u201cPsycho\u201d + \u201cHitchcock\u201d<\/td>\n14<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The results here are even more impressive when you consider that \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d is routinely misidentified as \u201cThe Road Less Traveled,\u201d thereby reducing the search volume under the poem\u2019s actual title. (For instance, a search for \u201cFrost\u2019s poem the road less traveled\u201d produces more than two hundred thousand results, none of which would have been counted above.) Frost once claimed his goal as a poet was \u201cto lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of \u201d; with \u201cThe Road Not Taken,\u201d he appears to have lodged his lines in granite. On a word-for-word basis, it may be the most popular piece of literature ever written by an American.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>And almost everyone gets it wrong. This is the most remarkable thing about \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d\u2014not its immense popularity (which is remarkable enough), but the fact that it is popular for what seem to be the wrong reasons. It\u2019s worth pausing here to underscore a truth so obvious that it is often taken for granted: Most widely celebrated artistic projects are known for being essentially what they purport to be. When we play \u201cWhite Christmas\u201d in December, we correctly assume that it\u2019s a song about memory and longing centered around the image of snow falling at Christmas. When we read Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em>, we correctly assume that it\u2019s a complex story about a journey around Dublin as filtered through many voices and styles. A cultural offering may be simple or complex, cooked or raw, but its audience nearly always knows what kind of dish is being served.<\/p>\n

Frost\u2019s poem turns this expectation on its head. Most readers consider \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion (\u201cI took the one less traveled by\u201d), but the literal meaning of the poem\u2019s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem\u2019s speaker tells us he \u201cshall be telling,\u201d at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths \u201cequally lay \/ In leaves\u201d and \u201cthe passing there \/ Had worn them really about the same.\u201d So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally <\/em>traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.<\/p>\n

According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming \u201cages and ages hence\u201d that his decision made \u201call the difference\u201d only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn\u2019t a salute to can-do individualism; it\u2019s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, \u201cthe best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep\u2019s clothing.\u201d But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture <\/em>of a wolf in sheep\u2019s clothing.<\/p>\n

In this it strongly resembles its creator. Frost is the only major literary figure in American history with two distinct audiences, one of which regularly assumes that the other has been deceived. The first audience is relatively small and consists of poetry devotees, most of whom inhabit the art form\u2019s academic subculture. For these readers, Frost is a mainstay of syllabi and seminars, and a regular subject of scholarly articles (though he falls well short of inspiring the interest that Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens enjoy). He\u2019s considered bleak, dark, complex, and manipulative; a genuine poet\u2019s poet, not a historical artifact like Longfellow or a folk balladeer like Carl Sandburg. While Frost isn\u2019t the most esteemed of the early twentieth-century poets, very few dedicated poetry readers talk about him as if he wrote greeting card verse.<\/p>\n

Then there is the other audience. This is the great mass of readers at all age levels who can conjure a few lines of \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d and \u201cStopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,\u201d and possibly \u201cMending Wall \u201d or \u201cBirches,\u201d and who think of Frost as quintessentially American in the way that \u201camber waves of grain\u201d are quintessentially American. To these readers (or so the first audience often assumes), he isn\u2019t bleak or sardonic but rather a symbol of Yankee stoicism and countrified wisdom. This audience is large. Indeed, the search patterns of Google users indicate that, in terms of popularity, Frost\u2019s true peers aren\u2019t Pound or Stevens or Eliot, but rather figures like Pablo Picasso and Winston Churchill. Frost is not simply that rare bird, a popular poet; he is one of the best-known personages of the past hundred years in any cultural arena. In all of American history, the only writers who can match or surpass him are Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe, and the only poet in the history of English-language verse who commands more attention is William Shakespeare.<\/p>\n

This level of recognition makes poetry readers uncomfortable. Poets, we assume, are not popular\u2014at least after 1910 or so. If one becomes popular, then either he must be a second-tier talent catering to mass taste (as Sandburg is often thought to be) or there must be some kind of confusion or deception going on. The latter explanation is generally applied to Frost\u2019s celebrity. As Robert Lowell once put it, \u201cRobert Frost at midnight, the audience gone \/ to vapor, the great act laid on the shelf in mothballs.\u201d The \u201cgreat act\u201d is for \u201cthe audience\u201d of ordinary readers, but his true admirers know better. He is really a wolf, we say, and it is only the sheep who are fooled. It\u2019s an explanation that Frost himself sometimes encouraged, much as he used to boast about the trickiness of \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d in private correspondence. (\u201cI\u2019ll bet not half a dozen people can tell who was hit and where he was hit by my Road Not Taken,\u201d he wrote to his friend Louis Untermeyer.) In this sense, the poem is emblematic. Just as millions of people know its language about the road \u201cless traveled\u201d without understanding what that language is actually saying, millions of people recognize its author without understanding what that author was actually doing.<\/p>\n

But is this view of \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d and its creator entirely accurate? Poems, after all, aren\u2019t arguments\u2014they are to be interpreted, not proven, and that process of interpretation admits a range of possibilities, some supported by diction, some by tone, some by quirks of form and structure. Certainly it\u2019s wrong to say that \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d is a straightforward and sentimental celebration of individualism: this interpretation is contradicted by the poem\u2019s own lines. Yet it\u2019s also not quite right to say that the poem is merely a knowing literary joke disguised as shopworn magazine verse that has somehow managed to fool millions of readers for a hundred years. A role too artfully assumed ceases to become a role and instead becomes a species of identity\u2014an observation equally true of Robert Frost himself. One of Frost\u2019s greatest advocates, the scholar Richard Poirier, has written with regard to Frost\u2019s recognition among ordinary readers that \u201cthere is no point trying to explain the popularity away, as if it were a misconception prompted by a pose.\u201d By the same token, there is no point in trying to explain away the general misreadings of \u201cThe Road Not Taken,\u201d as if they were a mistake encouraged by a fraud. The poem both is and isn\u2019t about individualism, and it both is and isn\u2019t about rationalization. It isn\u2019t a wolf in sheep\u2019s clothing so much as a wolf that is somehow also a sheep, or a sheep that is also a wolf. It is a poem about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like its author, never makes a choice itself\u2014that instead repeatedly returns us to the same enigmatic, leaf-shadowed crossroads.<\/p>\n

From <\/em>The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong<\/a> by David Orr. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright \u00a9 2015 by David Orr.<\/em><\/p>\n

David Orr is the poetry columnist for\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0New 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\u00a0<\/em>The New Yorker,\u00a0<\/em>Poetry, <\/em>Slate, and\u00a0<\/em>The Yale Review.<\/em><\/p>\n

If you enjoyed this essay, we suggest reading our interview with the biographer Adam Plunkett,<\/span>\u201cIs Robert Frost Even a Good Poet<\/a>?\u201d <\/span>You can also subscribe<\/a> to The Paris Review<\/em> and receive one year\u2019s worth of issues and complete access to our seventy-two-year archive.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everyone knows Robert Frost\u2019s \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d\u2014and almost everyone gets it wrong. From The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong, a new book by David Orr. A young man hiking through a forest is abruptly confronted with a fork in the path. He pauses, his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":160,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2157],"tags":[9897,16228,1987,19403,19402,7221,165,13831,18949,53,13758,3110,19404,19405],"class_list":["post-89677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-poetry","tag-the-road-not-taken","tag-american-poets","tag-david-orr","tag-individualism","tag-interpretation","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-popularity","tag-quotation","tag-reading","tag-reputation","tag-robert-frost","tag-self-deception","tag-twentieth-century-poets"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Most Misread Poem in America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"David Orr on the popular misconceptions surrounding the iconic poem.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/11\/the-most-misread-poem-in-america\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Most Misread Poem in America by David Orr\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 11, 2015 \u2013 Everyone knows Robert Frost\u2019s \u201cThe Road Not Taken\u201d\u2014and almost everyone gets it wrong. 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