![]() ![]() In this view, "The Road Not Taken" "is perhaps the most famous example of Frost's own claims to conscious irony and 'the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep's clothing.'" Frost himself warned "You have to be careful of that one it's a tricky poem – very tricky." Īccording to Frost the poem is intended as a gentle jab at his great friend and fellow Dymock poet Edward Thomas, with whom he used to take walks through the forest (Thomas always complained at the end that they should have taken a different path) he seemed amused at the interpretation of the poem as inspirational. The ironic interpretation, widely held by critics, is that the poem is instead about making personal choices and rationalizing our decisions, whether with pride or with regret. As a popular symbol of that attitude, Frost's mythical "Road Less Travelled" ranks after only Thoreau's "different drummer." Popular interpretations take the last 2 lines literally, as meaning that the speaker was a courageous nonconformist in taking a road few other people had taken. Popular interpretation Īccording to the popular interpretation, the poem is inspirational, a paean to individualism and non-conformism. The poem has at least 2 interpretations: a popular interpretation that reads the last lines of the poem literally, as an expression of individualism and an ironic interpretation, offered by many critics, that reads those lines as ironic in the context of the poem as a whole. ![]() Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" Interpretation "The Road Not Taken" is a narrative poem consisting of 4 stanzas of iambic tetrameter and is one of Frost's best-known works. The title is often mistakenly given as " The Road Less Traveled", from the penultimate line: "I took the one less traveled by". "The Road Not Taken" was the opening poem in Frost's 1916 collection, Mountain Interval. ![]()
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