The Road Not Taken -- Robert Frost

Did I say time constraints? Sorry - I meant severe date constraints, of
course - given the date, I couldn't not post that <g>. We now return you to
your regularly scheduled blither^Wpoetry...

(Poem #51) 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. -- Robert Frost

Roads have long fascinated mankind, whether as metaphors for life, change,
journeys, partings, adventure, etc., or simply as roads, with all their
implications of 'here' and 'not here', and the fact that the two may not be
as separate as one thought. This is probably why they, and all their
attendant images, have permeated art, literature (especially sf&f) and song.
They have also inspired some of my favourite poems, including Tolkien's "The
Road Goes Ever On" [minstrels poem #4, and do read the quoted passage of
text after it] and this one.

As for the poem itself, there are doubtless a multitude of meanings hidden
below the surface - the main one, of course, refers to Frost's own life, and
the decisions he made therein (see biography). Personally I feel that the
however many layers of meaning and allusion a poem contains, it is the
literal, surface reading that determines much of its merit (and nearly all
of its popularity). This poem certainly passes the test - it is nicely
lyrical, and the last verse is one of Frost's most quoted.

Biographical Notes:

  b. March 26, 1874, San Francisco, Calif., U.S.
  d. Jan. 29, 1963, Boston, Mass. in full ROBERT LEE FROST American poet
  who was much admired for his depictions of the rural life of New
  England, his command of American colloquial speech, and his realistic
  verse portraying ordinary people in everyday situations.

  Meanwhile, Robert continued to labour on the poetic career he had begun
  in a small way during high school; he first achieved professional
  publication in 1894 when The Independent, a weekly literary journal,
  printed his poem "My Butterfly: An Elegy." Impatient with academic
  routine, Frost left Dartmouth after less than a year. He and Elinor
  married in 1895 but found life difficult, and the young poet supported
  them by teaching school and farming, neither with notable success. [...]

  Frost became an enthusiastic botanist and acquired his poetic persona of
  a New England rural sage during the years he and his family spent at
  Derry. All this while he was writing poems, but publishing outlets showed
  little interest in them.

  By 1911 he was fighting against discouragement. Poetry had always been
  considered a young person's game, but Frost, who was nearly 40 years
  old, had not published a single book of poems and had seen just a
  handful appear in magazines. In 1911 ownership of the Derry farm
  passed to Frost. A momentous decision was made: to sell the farm and
  use the proceeds to make a radical new start in London, where
  publishers were perceived to be more receptive to new talent.
  Accordingly, in August 1912 the Frost family sailed across the
  Atlantic to England. Frost carried with him sheaves of verses he had
  written but not gotten into print. English publishers in London did
  indeed prove more receptive to innovative verse, and, through his own
  vigorous efforts and those of the expatriate American poet Ezra Pound,
  Frost within a year had published A Boy's Will (1913). From this first
  book, such poems as "Storm Fear," "Mowing," and "The Tuft of Flowers"
  have remained standard anthology pieces.

  In London, Frost's name was frequently mentioned by those who followed
  the course of modern literature, and soon American visitors were
  returning home with news of this unknown poet who was causing a sensation
  abroad. The Boston poet Amy Lowell traveled to England in 1914, and in
  the bookstores there she encountered Frost's work. Taking his books home
  to America, Lowell then began a campaign to locate an American publisher
  for them, meanwhile writing her own laudatory review of North of Boston.

  Without his being fully aware of it, Frost was on his way to fame. [...]
  Frost soon found himself besieged by magazines seeking to publish his
  poems. Never before had an American poet achieved such rapid fame after
  such a disheartening delay. From this moment his career rose on an
  ascending curve.
    -- EB

  [Frost was also the first, and afaik only, person to win the Pulitzer four
  times - m.]

Criticism:

  Frost was the most widely admired and highly honoured American poet of
  the 20th century. Amy Lowell thought he had overstressed the dark
  aspects of New England life, but Frost's later flood of more uniformly
  optimistic verses made that view seem antiquated. Louis Untermeyer's
  judgment that the dramatic poems in North of Boston were the most
  authentic and powerful of their kind ever produced by an American has
  only been confirmed by later opinions. Gradually, Frost's name ceased
  to be linked solely with New England, and he gained broad acceptance
  as a national poet.

  It is true that certain criticisms of Frost have never been wholly
  refuted, one being that he was overly interested in the past, another
  that he was too little concerned with the present and future of
  American society. Those who criticize Frost's detachment from the
  "modern" emphasize the undeniable absence in his poems of meaningful
  references to the modern realities of industrialization, urbanization,
  and the concentration of wealth, or to such familiar items as radios,
  motion pictures, automobiles, factories, or skyscrapers. The poet has
  been viewed as a singer of sweet nostalgia and a social and political
  conservative who was content to sigh for the good things of the past.

  Such views have failed to gain general acceptance, however, in the
  face of the universality of Frost's themes, the emotional authenticity
  of his voice, and the austere technical brilliance of his verse. Frost
  was often able to endow his rural imagery with a larger symbolic or
  metaphysical significance, and his best poems transcend the immediate
  realities of their subject matter to illuminate the unique blend of
  tragic endurance, stoicism, and tenacious affirmation that marked his
  outlook on life. Over his long career Frost succeeded in lodging more
  than a few poems where, as he put it, they would be "hard to get rid
  of," and he can be said to have lodged himself just as solidly in the
  affections of his fellow Americans. For thousands he remains the only
  recent poet worth reading and the only one who matters.

    -- EB

[And a couple of rather long pieces on Frost's use of language, included
because they shed a revealing light on this and most of his poems.]

  When he was (supposedly) twenty, Frost first realized that real artistic
  speech was only to be copied from life. He never claimed to be the first
  poet to arrive at this understanding, but found that "where English poetry
  was greatest it was by virtue of this same method in the poet" and "he
  illustrated it in Shakespeare, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Emerson" (Lathem and
  Thompson 259). Frost explained his method as follows:

    What we do get in life and miss so often in literature is the sentence
    sounds that underlie the words. Words themselves do not convey meaning,
    and to [. . . prove] this, . . . let us take the example of two people who
    are talking on the other side of a closed door, whose voices can be heard
    but whose words cannot be distinguished. Even though the words do not
    carry, the sound of them does, and the listener can catch the meaning of
    the conversation. . . . [T]o me a sentence is not interesting merely in
    conveying a meaning of words. It must do something more; it must convey a
    meaning by sound. (Lathem and Thompson 261)

  What Frost strove to achieve was what he called "sound posturing," or
  "getting the sound of sense" (Lathem and Thompson 259). As for his language,
  Marie Borroff argues in her essay, "Robert Frost's New Testament: The Uses
  of Simplicity," that Frost manages to use "simple" words in order to achieve
  "high style." Borroff analyzes certain of his early poems and discovers a
  statistically low content of both Romance and Latinate words, and a high
  content of words of native derivation--not to mention a preponderance of
  one- and two-syllable words. The effect of this is to lend Frost's poetry an
  apparently "simple" and informal speech.

  But Borroff maintains that writers and speakers adopt different modes of
  discourse for different purposes, and that diction and vocabulary are
  selected as appropriate for a particular occasion, from the "distinctly
  formal" to the "distinctly colloquial" (69). Between the two extremes,
  however, lies "the 'common' level to which most words belong.. Such words
  are 'common' to literary and colloquial use alike. . . . They are
  chameleon-like, standing out neither as conspicuously folksy or talky in
  literary contexts nor as conspicuously pretentious in colloquial contexts"
  (69). Such words take on a particular "air" of formality, or of informality,
  in a particular context. "[A] number of Frost's best-known early lyrics are
  made of a language from which distinctively formal words are largely
  excluded. But it is equally true and important . . . that the language of
  these poems is lacking in words and expressions of distinctively colloquial
  quality" (70). In addition, Borroff notes that in its Biblical allusiveness,
  Frost's language acquires a "high formality" that can be attributed to the
  dignity of tone which is imputed to religious subject matter in our cultural
  tradition (73).

  Frost's language, therefore, cannot be adequately described as "simple" or
  as merely "common." Rather, "it dips occasionally to the distinctively
  colloquial level of everyday talk, as in the remark 'Spring is the mischief
  in me" . . . . It is embellished with an occasional poetic or biblical
  archaism of native derivation (o'er night and henceforth in "The Tuft of
  Flowers"), or archaic construction ("knew not" in "Mowing") or inversion of
  word order ("something there is" in "Mending Wall") (Borroff 72).

      -- Susan Siferd,
      <[broken link] http://www.wmich.edu/english/tchg/640/papers/Siferd.Frost.dev.html>

  The sign that he is at home is that his language is plain; it is the human
  vernacular, as simple on the surface as monosyllables can make it. Strangely
  enough this is what makes some readers say he is hard--he is always
  referring to things he does not name, at any rate in the long words they
  suppose proper. He seems to be saying less than he does; it is only when we
  read close and listen well, and think between the sentences, that we become
  aware of what his poems are about. What they are about is the important
  thing--more important, we are tempted to think, than the words themselves,
  though it was the words that brought the subject on. The subject is the
  world: a huge and ruthless place which men will never quite understand, any
  more than they will understand themselves; and yet it is the same old place
  that men have always been trying to understand, and to this extent it is as
  familiar as an old boot or an old back door, lovable for what it is in spite
  of the fact that it does not speak up and identify itself in the idiom of
  abstraction. Frost is a philosopher, but his ideas are behind his poems, not
  in them--buried well, for us to guess at if we please.

    -- Mark van Doren, in The Atlantic Monthly
    <http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/frost/vand.htm>

m.