The road not taken summary and theme7/6/2023 ![]() The hiker regrets at first that they cannot go down both paths-“Sorry I could not travel both” (Line 2)-a quixotic, and unsettlingly childish response that masks major confusion. This presents an unsettling dilemma, which path to take. The hiker suddenly comes to an unexpected fork in the path. Poetry Foundation.Ī nameless hiker of indeterminate age and non-specified gender takes a leisurely morning stroll through a familiar forest, its trees a monochromatic yellow. His epitaph quotes his own poem “The Lesson for Today”: “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”įrost, Robert. He was buried by his wife and five of his children in a modest grave in the rustic churchyard of the Old First Church in Bennington, Vermont. Frost continued to write until his death in Boston in January 1963, following a massive heart attack. The bravura performance cemented Frost’s international reputation as America’s Poet. ![]() Without missing a beat, he recited from memory “The Gift Outright,” a poem he published nearly 50 years earlier. Kennedy, a fellow New Englander and an avid admirer of Frost’s work, to deliver an original poem at Kennedy’s inauguration in January, 1961, the poet, then 86, could not make out the typed lines of the poem he wrote because of the glare of the sun. ![]() ![]() His verse, grounded in traditional notions of careful metrics and strict rhyme ( free verse, he often complained, was like playing tennis without the net), was at once accessible and conversational and yet philosophically profound, even unsettling. With his craggy face and shock of unkempt white hair, Frost became, after Ernest Hemingway, the most recognized writer of his generation, gracing the covers of both Time and Life. He gave public readings that became entertainment sensations. Frost enjoyed a long teaching career at different universities working with young poets. His collections were best sellers, and Frost himself became a celebrity. Over the next 20 years, Frost became America’s most prolific and most admired poet. There he found welcome company among the Modernists, most notably American expatriate Ezra Pound.įrost, then in his forties, quickly published two well-received volumes of poetry, and when he returned to the United States in 1915 his work was widely recognized for its lyrical grace, its carefully chiseled lines, and its exploration of the dynamic between humanity and nature. He failed at all of them, and in 1912, desperate to find a publisher for his poetry, he and his wife relocated to Dymock, England, about two hours west of London. ![]() He tried a number of occupations, including shoe repair, journalism, and even working the farm his grandfather bought for him when Frost married. He struggled to commit to the discipline of education, attending first Dartmouth College and then briefly Harvard but never finishing a degree. A precocious reader early on, particularly the intricate metrical inventions of Edgar Allan Poe, Frost always knew he would be a poet. Take either path, the poem slyly suggests with existential irony, it makes little difference.Īlthough when he died at 88 in 1963, Robert Frost was regarded as America’s most beloved poet and the nation’s unofficial Poet Laureate, the winner of four Pulitzer Prizes and one of the most recognized American writers of the 20th century, Frost struggled to find a publisher for his poetry until he was nearly 40.ĭespite his reputation as the poet of the rugged New England backwoods, Frost was actually born in San Francisco, although he came to Massachusetts when he was 11 when his family moved there after his father, a successful journalist, died. Choice becomes meaningful only in retrospect, a measure of the ability of the mind later to refashion such impulsive decisions into something that passes for wisdom. A major expression of Modernism, in which a generation of daring and uncompromising poets, centered in England, recast the nature of poetry itself through a subtle use of irony that infused their verse with an alarming sense of anxiety and spiritual crisis, the poem resists making heroic the assertion of choice in life and suggests in fact that such dramatic choices really have no consequences. The poem, however, is deceptively simple. ![]()
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