Your ideas on this famous poem

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Originally Posted by YesNo

I don't think one can save Williams' poem based on arguments of ambiguity. Consider the following ambiguous poem:

so much depends upon
this
that
something else

Add in whatever sentiment you want and then interpret the poem. I prefer poems that have enough in them already that the remaining ambiguity "trips the reader head foremost into the boundless" as Frost described what he wants to achieve.

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Your notion that Williams' poem needs saving is foolish and naive. Many readers better versed in literature than either of us have found much to be admired in the poem, not to mention the leagues of amateur readers who have also gained pleasure from it. The poem has lasted longer, of course, than your re-writing of it will. But judging from many of your previous posts, I am willing to bet that you think those readers are pretentious, deluded blowhards merely claiming to enjoy the poem for the sake of an illusory cultural cachet.

If I'm wrong about what you believe (and when someone guesses what someone else thinks, error is usually the result), let me know. Let's continue this discussion.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

The idea that people generally misunderstand Frost's poem is false. There is little in the poem to misunderstand. One can add various interpretations to the poem and I found Calidore's interpretation that references the yellow brick road in the Wizard of Oz enjoyable. Kilgore's interpretation, on the other hand, seemed mean spirited. The whole idea that the poem is misunderstood is mean spirited. It attempts to belittle the reader for enjoying a truly great poem and may even be an attempt to disparage the poem itself.

It is possible to misunderstand a poem especially if the poet is trying to be deceptive or to manipulate the reader, that is, giving the reader one idea but intending something else. However, I don't think Frost was doing that although my only information about him comes from the brief summary of his life in Robert Faggen's introduction to him.

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The "Marlboro-man vision of heroic selfhood" is clearly and demonstrably a misunderstanding, since there is not a line in the poem to support it. However, Kilgore's attitude is rather uppity and he's obviously having fun taking down those students and teachers who have this misconception about the poem, so that makes me wonder if his bias isn't making him represent the poem as more misunderstood than it actually is. Now we never had this poem in school, for us it was always "the woods are lovely dark and deep" one, and although to me it seems easy enough to get the gist of this poem, I also know that the idea of taking the road less travelled has sunk into our cultural consciousness as one of the "right answers", like World Peace, and could lead to misinterpretation.

So my question is, is this poem really as widely misinterpreted as Kilgore claims?

I would think it should be very difficult to misunderstand Frost's poem, but I have to admit that there are people, like Kilgore, who do misunderstand it.

To be fair, Kilgore seems to be on the right track with his interpretations. We may not agree with each and every shade of meaning, but I do not feel he's come up with anything completely contradictory to what is expressed in the text of the poem. I just feel that owing to his preconceptions, he may be misjudging the ability of most people to understand the poem.

Frost likely started the idea that people can't understand this poem. Elaine Barry, Robert Frost, page 12, writes this:

Without a proper attention to the speaking voice of Frost's poems, we may well get his subjects out of perspective. How many of us, for example, first read "The Road Not Taken" as a serious, if wistful, comment on the irrevocable decisions that govern our lives? Frost himself was fond of teasing his readers on their gullibility here ("I bet not one reader in ten knows what 'The Road Not Taken' is about").

Now step back and ask, is this poem not about the irrevocable decisions that govern our lives as seen from the perspective of one person imagining he is looking back on a choice he is about to make?

She continues:

He once declared that the most perceptive question anyone ever raised with regard to the poem was "Why the 'sigh'?" in the line "I shall be telling this with a sigh." The "sigh", of course, helps to characterize the "I," and provides the first hint that the poem is a gentle parody of the kind of person whose life in the present is distorted by nostalgic regrets for the possibilities of the past, who is less concerned for the road taken than for the "road not taken."

Looking back on a past choice there will be regrets or at least wonder about the option not taken and a sense of justification for the one that was taken. I don't think this is peculiar to a personality type that Edward Thomas might have had.

So, I'm confused by what is going on here with saying this poem is misunderstood. Are people saying it because Frost said it first and they are trying to justify what Frost claimed? If most readers misunderstand the poem, what was that misunderstanding? What is it about the poem that we are too stupid to see? A misunderstanding assumes there is a correct understanding. What is it?

I watched Billy Cristal's 700 Mornings last night and he referenced this quote by Yogi Berra, number 15 in this list: http://listverse.com/2011/04/13/25-f...of-yogi-berra/.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

It reminded me of Frost's poem.

One Robert Frost anecdote suggests that he placed little credibility on his own analyses of his poems. A young woman (the story goes) told him, "I love your new poem, Mr. Frost. But I'm not sure what it means. What were you trying to say?"

"What? Do you want me to say the poem over again in worser English?" replied the poet.

If Frost's own analyses of his poems is in doubt that might explain why he thought others didn't understand this poem, but I wonder if he had a different motivation for saying that most readers didn't understand "The Road Not Taken" which was supposedly prompted by a walk he and Edward Thomas took.

I don't know much about Frost, but this is how I imagine it happened, and I could be full of it.

Frost and Thomas were taking a walk. They came to a fork in the road and Thomas wasn't sure which way to go. He looked this way for some hint that it might be better than that way, but he couldn't decide. Frost became impatient, like many of us would, and told Thomas to make up his mind. Eventually Frost convinced him to go on the road that, for all they knew, might have been less used.

Later when Frost wrote about the event he could have said something less kind about Thomas' indecision, but left it as "I took the one less traveled by" and then added "And that has made all the difference." When Frost was done, what he wrote surprised him. He was not stupid. He could see all the heroic individualism and ideas about taking the straight and narrow implied in those lines and he was glad he wrote them. He sent the book to Thomas whom he hoped would be pleased as well. A few years later Thomas was killed in the first world war.

Frost should have written another poem about Edward Thomas after Thomas' death, but Frost was not a confessional poet. So instead of writing another poem, he said that readers did not understand the earlier one. They didn't notice that the title was the road not taken not the one that was. He said that the "sigh" was important to understanding the poem implying that there was regret that something wasn't done right and most readers missed that.

I imagine Frost thought back to that walk where Thomas confronted the fork in the road and he remembered how he pressured Thomas with his impatience to decide and Thomas choose the one less traveled by while wondering where the road not taken would have led. Frost also made choices that day. If Frost could have replayed his own choices all over again, I think he would have said, "Edward, take all the time you need."

I'm not of the opinion that the meaning of a poem can be inferred from outside reading. We tend to read around when we study but how can anything not written in the poem be brought to bear on it?

The life of the poet is often irrelevant to understanding a poem. If people weren't claiming that this particular poem is misunderstood by most people, there would be no problem. But since questions arise about the poem, then looking for information outside the poem makes sense.

We had this discussion in the thread about Pablo Neruda. Should one consider Neruda's life when reading his poetry? In that case, for me at least, lines in Neruda's "Residencia en la tierra" raised questions about Neruda's intentions. When I looked further into his life, even his earlier "Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada" made me suspect the poems were not about what I thought they were about originally. I can see that I misunderstood them, but it was a misunderstanding that Neruda wanted me to have.

In the case of "The Road Not Taken", I don't think the obvious understanding is a misunderstanding. There is just more to see, if one wants to do so, but it is not necessary to do so to enjoy the poem. I don't know if I am right, but at least there is an hypothesis in my mind that can be falsified when more information comes in.

To be honest I don’t dissect a poem to figure out what the guy was on about, if I feel the need to solve a problem I turn to the chess board. Poetry is the shortest form of the written word and as so it requires an immediate impact on the reader, not six paragraphs of explanation. Thomas’s ‘Fern Hill’ connects with the first line. Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs. Connects immediately with the reader i.e. a young boy’s imagination and so for me I’m completely with the poem as I read. As for "The Road Not Taken" I leave it for others.

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Originally Posted by Carousel

To be honest I don’t dissect a poem to figure out what the guy was on about, if I feel the need to solve a problem I turn to the chess board. Poetry is the shortest form of the written word and as so it requires an immediate impact on the reader, not six paragraphs of explanation. Thomas’s ‘Fern Hill’ connects with the first line. Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs. Connects immediately with the reader i.e. a young boy’s imagination and so for me I’m completely with the poem as I read. As for "The Road Not Taken" I leave it for others.

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I don't agree with this entirely. Poetry is the shortest form, but it can also be the most dense, metaphor rich and technique laden form there is. It depends upon the poem.

A study of Eliot's poetry bears insight and understanding. Other forms are more obvious but are no less powerful for that.

I think The Road Less Travelled benefits from being unlinked to a specific time place and meaning.

As an aside, this thread has been interesting and has provoked some good discussion. It's likely that the older members have discussed this particular poem before - I seem to remember a comment to when a poetry discussion was set up in the past about not discussing the same old author - yet the discussions undertaken were probably too ambitious to be sustained. There's clearly an appetite for such discussion, though it might be more sustainable on an individual poem basis.

There is a poem of the week thread that could be used for this. Or perhaps create another poem discussion thread?

What do you think?

I enjoyed this. Especially as no one seemed to get too ratty or miss the point by a mile as I have seen happening before. On a writer's biography it is common sense that life experiences inform our thinking, attitudes, behaviour and words. Well to me that is Common Sense but to others it is apostasy and heresy and whatever else they like to call anything that's not their own impractical criticism.

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Originally Posted by ennison

I enjoyed this. Especially as no one seemed to get too ratty or miss the point by a mile as I have seen happening before. On a writer's biography it is common sense that life experiences inform our thinking, attitudes, behaviour and words. Well to me that is Common Sense but to others it is apostasy and heresy and whatever else they like to call anything that's not their own impractical criticism.

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It is an interesting point about how you read and read around a poem. It seems true that a poem will be based upon a writer's experience, yet it is written to be complete in itself without an expectation that something else should be read to complement it. I'm not saying that reading around a poem will not provide interesting insights into a poem's inspiration and the subject it is written about, but in the end, if a poem cannot be read, appreciated and say something significant or entertain as it is, then is that poem entirely successful?

It reminds me of Blake's The Tyger, which we studied at Uni. It had been in vogue to relate the poem to The French revolution, but by the time I studied it, this reading was discredited. Reading the poem myself I just could not see what in the text related to The French Revolution, and I still think it is an erroneous reading.

Here is another way one can understand The Road Not Taken based on looking at this description of Edward Thomas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Thomas_(poet)

Thomas enlisted in the Artists Rifles in July 1915, despite being a mature married man who could have avoided enlisting. He was unintentionally influenced in this decision by his friend Frost, who had returned to the U.S. but sent Thomas an advance copy of "The Road Not Taken". The poem was intended by Frost as a gentle mocking of indecision, particularly the indecision that Thomas had shown on their many walks together; however, most audiences took the poem more seriously than Frost intended, and Thomas similarly took it seriously and personally, and it provided the last straw in Thomas' decision to enlist.

Frost and Thomas were likely discussing whether Thomas should enlist. He didn't have to and so there was a choice about which he could be indecisive and with good reason. He had a family to take care of and he was in his late 30s.

Which choice was the "road not taken" and which was the "road less traveled by"? I don't think it is clear what Frost's intention was. Thomas, if the story is correct, felt there was a message in the poem.

Looking at this from the perspective of a choice whether to enlist or not is just one understanding of the poem. It is not the only one.

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Originally Posted by Paulclem

I don't agree with this entirely. Poetry is the shortest form, but it can also be the most dense, metaphor rich and technique laden form there is. It depends upon the poem.

A study of Eliot's poetry bears insight and understanding. Other forms are more obvious but are no less powerful for that.

I think The Road Less Travelled benefits from being unlinked to a specific time place and meaning.

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Well possibly but this desire to fathom what the poets thoughts on his/her poem when the writer has been dead for years is at its best mere speculation. I remember a pundit on TV spending twenty minutes trying to convince me that the little dog in the bottom left hand corner of a painting was a secret display of the artist’s Jacobean tendencies that he dare not voice publicly under pain of death.

Well maybe, but equally the artist could have thought, well there’s nothing much going on in that corner, I’ll stick a cuddly little pooch in to liven it up. Since the artist had left this world 300yrs ago no one knows and more to the point does anyone care?

Everyone has their own thoughts on poems they read but why should a poet deliberately mask the meaning of a poem, which I feel that some creative writing students are persuaded to do often with the result of making the piece incomprehensible.

For me the attraction of poetry is in the phrasing, the ability to say with a few words what it would take me two or three lines to say and yet add nothing to those few words. The meaning is crystal clear but the reader sees it through a new window.

I agree that poets should not deliberately mask their meaning and the attraction of poetry is in the phrasing.

There is another book by Mark Richardson, "The Ordeal of Robert Frost", that I hoped to find something interesting in. There was this on page 181:

Which one, after all, is the road "not taken". Is it the one the speaker takes, which, according to his last description of it, is "less traveled"--that is to say, not taken by others. Or does the title refer to the supposedly better-traveled road that the speaker himself fails to take?

So, the road not taken, could have been the one less traveled by and then there is no problem between the title and the last stanza.

I wonder what Thomas took too seriously in the poem. If his decision to enlist was a road less traveled by people of Thomas' age and family status, does this not push the meaning of the poem right back into that Marlboro-man idea of heroic selfhood that Kilgore insisted the poem was not about?

Carousel - did you read my next post in which I think we are saying similar things?

The discussion may well come down to what the nature of a poem is. It is meant to be a piece of art complete in itself without anything necessary to read to support it. It will be written with an audience in mind - Eliot used classical references no doubt with the idea that these would be comprehended by a certain standard of education and thus class. It is interesting though that his notes relating to The Wasteland are of very little help in reading and understanding the poem.

This though, does bring in the fact that poem's take on a life of their own beyond the author - even more so now. In later years Eliot wished he had not written the Wasteland in that form. John Donne said he regretted his earlier metaphysical poem's when he became a preacher.

I think what I'm saying is once a poem is complete, what may be written about it does not pin it down - and this may also be the poet. This leaves it open to relevant reinterpretation by later generations, but because of this you have to stick primarily with the text of the poem in order to glean an understanding of it. A good poem may well evolve, as may attitudes to it.

The text of a poem may be all one has, but in the case of The Road Not Taken there is a lot more surrounding the poem. We also have Frost's performance of it and comments on it, in particular the comment that his poem was misunderstood. This extra information is like an aura around the poem. It is not necessary to look at it, but looking can increase one's enjoyment of the poem.

There is an underlying rule of sorts that insists that one should not judge an artist's work by an artist's life. I think the reason for that is the artist's life might be quite ugly.

I found the following last night while at the library in Louis Untermeyer's "Robert Frost The Road Not Taken" (1971, page 269)

Robert Frost has gone his own way. He could not help it, his destination--and perhaps his destiny--was directed by the spirit behind the man. This inevitable progress is indicated in a much-quoted and much-misunderstood poem, "The Road Not Taken."

I don't agree with the inevitability part, but notice that here, again, we have the idea that the poem is misunderstood. Is there any other poem by Frost that is so acknowledged as misunderstood? I don't know, but I doubt it. Having the poem be "misunderstood" is part of Frost's performance of it that goes beyond the text itself. There is nothing to understand about this misunderstanding. Just enjoy the performance.

One benefit of this mythical misunderstanding is that it brings up an association with Edward Thomas which may be also part of the performance of the poem. I don't think Frost would have objected to calling attention to Thomas' own poetry. You can read the poems here: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22423/pg22423.html I have enjoyed them as much as I've enjoyed Frost's poems. There is also a collection called "Last Poems".