Frost knows, as the reader gradually intuits, that you won’t go back because you can’t. The conditional tense doesn’t really apply here although Frost uses it to maintain the tone of regretfulness and nostalgia. One way is as good as the other and while we can console ourselves with wishful thinking – “I kept the first for another day!” – the poet knows that there’s no turning back to start over: “Yet knowing how way leads on to way/I doubted if I should ever come back.” We have to choose, and most terrifyingly, the choice may not actually matter. In fact, do the roads even exist at all? It appears they don’t.įrost’s gently presented point is not just that we are self-reliant or independent, but truly alone in the world. And then it becomes clear the neither road has been travelled much at all. The traveler/poet avoids the one that disappears in the (slightly ominous) underbrush, but then describes the one that he does take as “just as fair” as the one he rejects. Yet when you read through the description of the roads after Frost has set out the problem in the opening stanza about having to make a choice, one realizes that neither road is “less travelled by.” The poet/traveler looks at one “as far as I could/To where it bent in the undergrowth ” and doesn’t go that way but instead:Īgain there is confusion about the condition of the roads. Since everyone wants to consider themselves self-reliant and unique – we don’t follow fashion or the crowd, no sir – the conclusion of the poem taps into and appeals to our self-regard. The decision again plays off against the title North of Boston as an apparent declaration of independence against cosmopolitanism, society and the opinion of others. Working through the problem of choice, by the end of the poem he makes his choice in a famous statement of flinty individualism, the very characteristics said to define the New Englander and Frost himself: The roads divide, but the self cannot be divided so the poet has to choose. “The Road Not Taken”, which was collected in Mountain Interval (1916), seems to be a fairly simple homily about making choices: Frost always draws you in, and then reveals that where you are isn’t at all what you expected. Frost’s technique is to take a familiar, even homey scene – describing a wall, birch trees, two roads – and then undermine or fracture the sense of comfort that those scenes evoke by exposing the capriciousness of modern life. It is a region of isolated farms and lonely roads, and it is in writing about that landscape that Frost merges the traditional with the modern to become a writer who is simultaneously terrifying and comfortable. The wonderful title evokes the rural hinterland of New England, away from the Boston society and economy. In North of Boston, Frost establishes himself as a close and careful observer of man in the natural world. 1915 became the year in which he became recognized as America’s quintessential poet in August, the Atlantic Monthly published what is perhaps Frost’s most well-known work, “The Road Not Taken.”

What mattered to Frost was that his English trip had worked. The years in England were crucial to Frost, but they have also caused confusion in straightening out his publishing history – the books appeared in reverse order in America and the poems that appeared in the magazines had in fact already appeared in print, albeit in England. Frost’s career was as well-launched as he could have hoped, and when he returned to the United States in early 1915, he had an American publisher and a dawning fame as his work appeared before the general public in journals like The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly. While reviews of the first book, A Boy’s Will, were generally favorable, but mixed, when it was published in 1913, North of Boston was immediately recognized as the work of a major poet. Frost had gone to England to add further polish to his writing skills and to make valuable contacts with the leading figures in Anglo-American literature, especially English writer Edward Thomas and expatriate American Ezra Pound Pound would be a crucial early supporter of Frost. Frost was very careful about how he managed the start of his career, wanting to make the strongest debut possible, and he diligently assembled the strongest lineup of poems possible for his books A Boy’s Will and North of Boston.

It’s a small irony in the career of Robert Frost that this most New England of poets published his first two books of poetry during the short period when he was living in Old England.

The road not taken frost