A Study Guide (New Edition) for Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide (New Edition) for Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781535867931

Book preview

17

The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost

1915

Introduction

Those who have happened to read Robert Frost's hallowed poem The Road Not Taken, which rings true as a celebration of nonconformity and individualism, of their own initiative may be surprised to hear what Frost himself, as cited in a Poetry Foundation article by Katherine Robinson, was liable to tell audiences about it: You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem—very tricky. One would hardly think so after an initial reading, or even after several, as the message of declining to simply follow the mindless flocks in life and instead forge new paths for oneself has been reverently absorbed by generations of readers in the century-plus since its original publication in 1915.

Nevertheless, Frost made clear, especially in correspondence with his close friend and fellow poet Edward Thomas, to whom the poem is essentially dedicated, that his primary intent was ironic. The two would take walks through the woods together, and Thomas was prone to indecisiveness about which path to follow as well as to lamenting, when the chosen path failed to lead where he had hoped, that the other path had not been taken. In The Road Not Taken, then, Frost somewhat playfully adopts Thomas's perspective— the title could refer to either path, the one not taken by others or the one not taken by the poet—and a close reading shows how the poet indeed pokes fun at his friend. However, close reading also suggests that Frost undermined his own irony, both through the remarkable subtlety of it and by virtue of the narrator's speaking from an incidentally transcendent perspective.

The poem, which appeared first in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1915 and then in Frost's third collection, Mountain Interval, in 1916, can also be found in Early Frost: The First Three Books (1996), most editions of selected Frost poetry, and any edition of his collected verse.

Author Biography

Robert Lee Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, California, to an editor for the San Francisco Post, William Prescott Frost Jr., and his wife, Isabelle Moodie, a housekeeper and published author of book reviews and poems. Frost's father, a Massachusetts native who had once tried to run away to join the Confederate army, gambled and drank excessively and tended