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 world hiking through a afforest is abruptly confronted with a fork in the way. 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 youthful 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 hitchhike out on the slope of a road. As a car slows to pick him up, we realize the driver is the master valet from the crossroads, merely now he ’ s accompanied by a cover girl womanhood and a child. The man smiles slightly, as if convinced in the liveliness he ’ sulfur choose and felicitous to lend that confidence to a fellow traveler. As the car pulls away and the screen door is lit with gold—for it ’ s a commercial we ’ ve been watching—the emblem of the Ford Motor Company concisely appears .
The ad I ’ ve just described play in New Zealand in 2008. And it is, in most respects, a normal assemble of vigorously assembled and softly manipulative product forwarding. But there is one identical strange aspect to this commercial. here is what is read by a voice-over artist, in the classifiable vowels of New Zealand, as the young man ponders his choice :
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And regretful I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked depressed one ampere far as I could
To where it bent in the underbrush ;
then took the other, american samoa fair as average,
And having possibly the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear ;
Though as for that the ephemeral there
Had worn them actually about the like ,
And both that dawn equally lay
In leaves no dance step had tread black.
Oh, I kept the beginning 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 therefore :
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the remainder .
It is, of course, “ The Road not Taken ” by Robert Frost. In the commercial, this fact is never announced ; the consultation is expected to recognize the poem unaided. For any mass consultation to recognize any poem is ( to put it mildly ) unusual. For an consultation of car buyers in New Zealand to recognize a hundred-year-old poem from a country eight thousand miles away is something else entirely .
Looking for something else to read? How about …
— Robert ’ s Frost ’ s Writers at Work interview
— Lucy Scholes ’ s column about forget books
— A shortstop narrative by Anthony Veasna So
But this international relations and security network ’ t just any poem. It ’ sulfur “ The Road not Taken, ” and it plays a unique character not plainly in american english literature, but in american culture —and in earth culture as well. Its signature phrases have become so omnipresent, so much a part of everything from coffee mugs to refrigerator magnets to graduation speeches, that it ’ second about potential to forget the poem is actually a poem. In summation to the Ford commercial, “ The Road not Taken ” has been used in advertisements for Mentos, Nicorette, the multibillion-dollar indemnity 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 ’ south provided sequence titles for more than a twelve television receiver series, including Taxi, The Twilight Zone, and Battlestar Galactica, a well as lending its name to at least one video game, Spry Fox ’ s Road not Taken ( “ a rogue-like puzzle game about surviving life ’ randomness surprises ” ). As one might expect, the influence of “ The Road not Taken ” is even greater on journalists and authors. Over the past thirty-five years alone, language from Frost ’ second poem has appeared in closely two thousand news stories worldwide, which yields a rate of more than once a week. In summation, “ The Road not Taken ” appears as a entitle, subtitle, or chapter head in more than four hundred books by authors early than Robert Frost, on subjects ranging from political theory to the impending automaton apocalypse. At least one of these was a massive international best seller : M. Scott Peck ’ s self-help bible The Road Less Traveled : A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth, which was primitively published in 1978 and has sold more than seven million copies in the United States and Canada .
Given the pervasiveness of Frost ’ s lines, it should come as no surprise that the popularity of “ The Road not Taken ” appears to exceed that of every other major twentieth-century american english poem, including those often considered more central to the modern ( and modernist ) era. true, 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 course of study doesn ’ t inevitably reveal a lot. 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 “ The Road not Taken ” is the most widely read and hark back american poem of the by century ( and possibly the adjective “ american ” could be discarded ). The inaugural is the Favorite Poem Project, which was devised by former poet laureate Robert Pinsky. Pinsky used his populace character to ask Americans to submit their favored poem in respective forms ; the clear front-runner among more than eighteen thousand entries was “ The Road not Taken. ”
The irregular, more persuasive reason comes from Google. Until it was discontinued in late 2012, a cock called Google Insights for Search allowed anyone to see how frequently certain expressions were being searched by users global over time and to compare expressions to one another. Google normalized the data to account for regional differences in population, converted it to a plate of one to one hundred, and displayed the results so that the relative differences in search book would be obvious. hera is the solution that Google provided when “ The Road not Taken ” and “ Frost ” were compared with several of the best-known mod poems and their authors, all of which are frequently teach aboard Frost ’ south influence in college courses on american english poetry of the inaugural half of the twentieth hundred :
search TERMS | SCALED WORLDWIDE SEARCH VOLUME
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| “Road Not Taken” + “Frost” | 48 |
| “Waste Land” + “Eliot” | 12 |
| “Prufrock ” + “Eliot” | 12 |
| “This Is Just to Say” + “Carlos Williams” | 4 |
| “Station of the Metro” + “Pound” | 2 |
According to Google, then, “ The Road not Taken ” was, as of mid-2012, at least four times arsenic searched as the cardinal text of the modernist era—The Waste Land—and at least twenty-four times adenine searched as the most anthologize poem by Ezra Pound. By comparison, this is even greater than the gross profit by which the term “ college football ” beats “ archery ” and “ water polo. ” Given Frost ’ s typically barbed relationships with about all of his peers ( he once described Ezra Pound as trying to become original by “ imitating person that hasn ’ metric ton been imitated recently ” ), one can alone imagine the pleasure this news would have brought him .
But as everyone knows, poetry itself international relations and security network ’ t particularly widely read, sol possibly being the most popular poem is like being the most wide requested salad at a steak house. How did “ The Road not Taken ” do against slenderly tougher rival ? Better than you might think :
search TERMS | SCALED WORLDWIDE SEARCH VOLUME
| “Road Not Taken” + “Frost” | 47 |
| “Like a Rolling Stone” + “Dylan” | 19 |
| “Great Gatsby ” + “Fitzgerald” | 17 |
| “Death of a Salesman” + “Miller” | 14 |
| “Psycho” + “Hitchcock” | 14 |
The results here are even more impressive when you consider that “ The Road not Taken ” is routinely misidentified as “ The Road Less Traveled, ” thereby reducing the search book under the poem ’ s actual title. ( For case, a research for “ Frost ’ s poem the road less travel ” produces more than two hundred thousand results, none of which would have been counted above. ) Frost once claimed his finish as a poet was “ to lodge a few poems where they will be unvoiced to get rid of ” ; with “ The Road not Taken, ” 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 .
*
And about everyone gets it wrong. This is the most remarkable thing about “ The Road not Taken ” —not its huge popularity ( which is noteworthy adequate ), but the fact that it is popular for what seem to be the incorrectly reasons. It ’ mho worth pausing here to underscore a truth so obvious that it is frequently taken for granted : Most wide celebrated artistic projects are known for being basically what they purport to be. When we play “ White Christmas ” in December, we correctly assume that it ’ s a song about memory and hanker centered around the image of snow falling at Christmas. When we read Joyce ’ mho Ulysses, we correctly assume that it ’ s a building complex floor about a travel round Dublin as filtered through many voices and styles. A cultural volunteer may be dim-witted or complex, cooked or raw, but its audience about always knows what kind of dish is being served .
Frost ’ s poem turns this expectation on its head. Most readers consider “ The Road not Taken ” to be a encomium to triumphant self-assertion ( “ I took the one less traveled by ” ), but the literal entail of the poem ’ s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem ’ randomness speaker tells us he “ shall be telling, ” at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled by, so far he has already admitted that the two paths “ evenly lay / In leaves ” and “ the authorize there / Had worn them actually about the same. ” So the road he will late call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are exchangeable .
According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ ages and ages therefore ” that his decision made “ all the dispute ” entirely 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 prospect ). The poem international relations and security network ’ t a salute to can-do individuality ; it ’ s a comment on the self-deception we practice when constructing the fib of our own lives. “ The Road not Taken ” may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, “ the best example in all of american poetry of a wolf in sheep ’ s clothing. ” But we could go far : It may be the best exemplar in all of american culture of a beast in sheep ’ sulfur clothing .
In this it strongly resembles its creator. Frost is the only major literary figure in american history with two discrete audiences, one of which regularly assumes that the other has been deceived. The first audience is relatively modest and consists of poetry devotees, most of whom inhabit the art form ’ s academic subculture. For these readers, Frost is a mainstay of course of study and seminars, and a regular submit of scholarly articles ( though he falls well short of inspiring the interest that Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens delight ). He ’ s considered black, blue, building complex, and manipulative ; a actual poet ’ s poet, not a historical artifact like Longfellow or a folk crooner like Carl Sandburg. While Frost isn ’ t the most think of of the early twentieth-century poets, very few dedicated poetry readers talk about him as if he wrote greeting card verse .
then there is the other audience. This is the bang-up batch of readers at all senesce levels who can conjure a few lines of “ The Road not Taken ” and “ Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, ” and possibly “ Mending Wall ” or “ Birches, ” and who think of Frost as quintessentially American in the way that “ amber waves of grain ” are quintessentially american. To these readers ( or then the first base hearing often assumes ), he isn ’ triiodothyronine bleak or sardonic but preferably a symbol of Yankee stoicism and countrified wisdom. This hearing is big. indeed, the search patterns of Google users indicate that, in terms of popularity, Frost ’ s true peers aren ’ t Pound or Stevens or Eliot, but quite figures like Pablo Picasso and Winston Churchill. Frost is not simply that rare dame, a democratic 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 merely poet in the history of English-language verse who commands more attention is William Shakespeare .
This degree of recognition makes poetry readers uncomfortable. Poets, we assume, are not popular—at least after 1910 or thus. If one becomes democratic, then either he must be a second-tier endowment cater to mass taste ( as Sandburg is much thought to be ) or there must be some kind of confusion or deception going on. The latter explanation is generally applied to Frost ’ south celebrity. As Robert Lowell once put it, “ Robert Frost at midnight, the audience gone / to vapor, the great act laid on the ledge in mothballs. ” The “ capital act ” is for “ the audience ” of ordinary readers, but his true admirers know better. He is actually a beast, we say, and it is only the sheep who are fooled. It ’ s an explanation that Frost himself sometimes encouraged, much as he used to boast about the rascality of “ The Road not Taken ” in private agreement. ( “ I ’ ll bet not half a twelve people can tell who was hit and where he was hit by my Road not Taken, ” he wrote to his supporter Louis Untermeyer. ) In this sense, the poem is emblematic. equitable as millions of people know its language about the road “ less travel ” without understanding what that linguistic process is actually saying, millions of people recognize its author without understanding what that generator was actually doing.
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But is this view of “ The Road not Taken ” and its creator entirely accurate ? Poems, after all, aren ’ t arguments—they are to be interpreted, not proven, and that procedure of interpretation admits a stove of possibilities, some supported by wording, some by tone, some by quirks of form and structure. Certainly it ’ s wrong to say that “ The Road not Taken ” is a aboveboard and sentimental celebration of individuality : this interpretation is contradicted by the poem ’ s own lines. Yet it ’ s besides not quite right to say that the poem is merely a knowing literary joke disguised as banal cartridge holder poetry that has somehow managed to fool millions of readers for a hundred years. A role excessively artfully simulate ceases to become a function and rather becomes a species of identity—an observation equally true of Robert Frost himself. One of Frost ’ s greatest advocates, the scholar Richard Poirier, has written with attentiveness to Frost ’ mho recognition among ordinary readers that “ there is no point trying to explain the popularity away, as if it were a misconception prompted by a pose. ” By the same token, there is no bespeak in trying to explain away the general misreadings of “ The Road not Taken, ” as if they were a mistake encouraged by a fraud. The poem both is and international relations and security network ’ thyroxine about individualism, and it both is and international relations and security network ’ thymine about systematization. It international relations and security network ’ thyroxine a wolf in sheep ’ south invest thus much as a wolf that is somehow besides a sheep, or a sheep that is besides a wolf. It is a poem about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like its writer, never makes a choice itself—that alternatively repeatedly returns us to the lapp enigmatic, leaf-shadowed crossroads .
From The Road not Taken : Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong by David Orr. Reprinted by agreement with The Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2015 by David Orr .
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.
