Most readers consider “The Road Not Taken” to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion (“I took the one less traveled by”), but the literal meaning of the poem’s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. Here’s an excerpt, titled, “ The Most Misread Poem in America”: In fact, critic David Orr wrote a whole book about how nearly everybody gets it wrong. When you actually read the poem, you realize it’s not about what most people think it’s about. Automatically take the harder route, and pretty soon you’re off on someplace of your own, and no one else’s rules apply.Īfter reading both quotes, my mind immediately went to Robert Frost’s “The Road Less Traveled,” which, I realized, I’d never really read before, and knew little about.įirst off, it is not called “The Road Less Traveled,” but “ The Road Not Taken.” Here’s how it was originally published in 1915: I found another interview with Close in which he phrased it just a bit differently:Įvery time you come to a fork in the road, don’t think. It’s excerpted from a longer quote by Chuck Close in the book, Inside The Studio: Two Decades of Talks with Artists in New York. In this sense, Frost explores and satirizes the notion of regret surrounding the unanswerable (and arguably unnecessary) question, “what if?”.I came across this quote in Leonard Koren’s What Artists Do. In the poem, the two paths are ultimately described as equally desirable options. In his letter, Frost wrote with friendly banter, “No matter which road you take, you’ll always sigh, and wish you’d taken another.” When they came to forks in the trails, they’d choose one path and afterward Thomas would invariably lament not having taken the other, expressing that it could have been the more beautiful of the two. According to an exchange of letters between the two, the poem refers to frequent walks they would take through wooded paths while Frost lived in England for a time. Frost wrote the poem in 1915, intended as a joke for his English friend, Edward Thomas.
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