In an article that appeared in The Paris Review, “The Most Misread Poem in America,” David Orr wrote of the Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken,” – “almost everyone gets it wrong”:

It isn’t a wolf in sheep’s clothing so much as a wolf that is somehow also a sheep, or a sheep that is also a wolf. It is a poem about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like its author, never makes a choice itself – that instead repeatedly returns us to the same enigmatic, leaf-shadowed crossroads.

Perhaps it would constitute a ‘valueless inference’ on my part to say what the poem really means inasmuch as Orr has already performed this task. Yet, does one really want to conclude that, since Frost’s work can be deceptively simple (which is already well-known), the former American poet laureate has undertaken to deceive? Separately, is it necessary to press for action or to fault one for inaction with respect to that which is already done, having only to be accepted?

The four-stanza poem by Frost, published in 1916, reads:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

 

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

 

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

 

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

The Paris Review article is taken from Orr’s 2015 book The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong (Penguin). He rejects the poem as being about the kind of rugged individualism that’s associated with a distinctly American can-do spirit. Rather, there can only have been a feigned choice at the famed fork. The speaker of the poem claims to have made a choice that in the end made him, when in actual fact he has made no choice at all. Orr reasons that 1) the roads are actually equal, so it doesn’t matter which road and/or 2) the word ‘shall’ is deceptively used in the final stanza. It would appear Frost is having it both ways. He pulls off a commentary about majority America being a self-deceived lot, willingly so. As well, Americans prove him right in their reception of the piece. Orr’s own position rests on the conclusion that Americans implicate themselves when they take the Frost poem at face value:

Most readers consider ‘The Road Not Taken’ to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion (‘I took the one less traveled by’), but the literal meaning of the poem’s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem’s speaker tells us he ‘shall be telling,’ at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths ‘equally lay/In leaves’ and ‘the passing there/Had worn them really about the same.’ So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable. (“The Most Misread Poem in America”)

It’s not a bullet proof argument, but I haven’t read the entire book. Based on what’s here, it seems that Orr has neglected to take into account what’s most crucial about the speaker’s estimation of equality between the two roads – its temporality: “And both that morning equally lay/In leaves no step had trodden black” – which seems not only to echo Jefferson’s assertion of equality among all men who are created, it speaks to really any lack of distinguishing marker between two things prior to the act of marking them.

Another point: why does Orr unmoor the word “shall” in the way he does? It takes place in the last stanza, after the speaker has already announced his action in the first line of the second stanza. If the action has already taken place, how can the “shall” indicate that the speaker will one day act? Even if this use of “shall” is allowed to function as a wistful utterance, it is as a projected ‘someday’ from which vantage one thinks back and tells of an action previously undertaken. That’s how nostalgia works (in which sense Frost does seem to have it both ways) and is what sets it apart in tone and tension as something not quite the same as self-deception, which still is where Orr wants to take the poem:

According to the reading, then, the speaker will be claiming ‘ages and ages hence’ that his decision made ‘all the difference’ only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.

Orr, who wrote an entire book on Frost, must have been aware that Frost and his wife lost three children: one to tuberculosis, one to suicide, and one who died at the age of four (Meyer and Miller 2020, 758). I would think for such a man there has to be two roads from which to choose, in order for there to be any chance of accepting a life not entirely of his own choosing. Meyer and Miller identify as among the major concerns in Frost’s poetry “the consequences of rejecting or accepting the conditions of one’s life” (759). The authors in their treatment of Frost also allow for the recognition that not just to act but to have beliefs, expectations, desires, to reflect, to imagine; these all are vital to poetic production and reception versus any single note of triumphant individualism or its lack.

To accord the poem another significance, the less traveled road could represent a valid logical inference. There is a sense in which an inference counts as an action, in which such an action speaks to an act of mind in possession of beliefs and desires, as distinct from a “heuristic imbecile” that doesn’t know what to think or believe and is paralyzed by inaction.

…the heuristic imbecile would squander its limited cognitive resources on such valueless inferences and would therefore be paralyzed for apparently appropriate inferences. Thus, for creatures with limited resources (such as time pressures), heuristic imbecility by itself entails complete logical incompetence. (Cherniak, 1986, 11)

The passage emphasizes human finitude (time pressures) as a limiting condition on cognition. Frost probably was aware of finitude in this sense, or “the fragility of life” that Meyer and Miller identify as another major theme in his work. This isn’t inconsistent with the only point of necessity underpinning the speaker’s dilemma, namely, that he couldn’t take both roads and still be one person, which does seem a valid concern for an individual with beliefs and desires, and an awareness of mortality. Heuristics in a more general sense is an aid in decision making under conditions of uncertainty. It’s supposed to reduce the tendency to fall back on what we already know in the act of decision making or interpretation, to reduce “cognitive bias” (e.g., to equate deceptive simplicity with an act of deception). While its recognition of human frailty makes for a lesser degree of self-evidence, it offers a way to leave the place rather than repeatedly return to the same ‘enigmatic crossroads,’ which sometimes can be driven by a desire for certitude.

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