Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken

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“The Road Not Taken,” by Robert Frost, is one of the most famous and recognized poems, however, it is also one of the most misinterpreted poems. The poem’s most familiar lines are the last few, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference” (18-20). These powerful lines that have made the poem so popular make it very easy for a reader to believe that Frost’s intention is to motivate his audience to be different and to deviate from the majority, however, a deeper look at the text reveals otherwise. A quick glance the poem leads the reader to believe that the narrator took a path that isn’t chosen very often, but the text reveals that both paths are actually very similar. In fact, the title of the poem itself may even imply that no decision was made at all, and that neither road was …show more content…

According to Matthew Hollis, in his article “Edward Thomas, Robert Frost and the road to war,” the poem is influenced by Robert Frost’s very close friend and fellow poet, Edward Thomas. Hollis writes that the two were so close that they had planned, in 1914, to “...live side by side in America, writing, teaching, farming,” after Britain declared war on Germany. Frost did end up moving to America, but Thomas was an individual who was very often plagued by indecisiveness, and ultimately decided to stay and fight for his country in the first World War, despite his anti-nationalist background (Hollis). The narrator in “The Road Not Taken” is riddled with the same indecisiveness that troubled Edward Thomas, which supports the fact that the main theme in the poem is not about nonconformity, but instead about the important choices that people make in their lifetime. Robert Frost pokes fun at those who become fixated on a decision, and what could have happened, instead of just living in the

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