seriesvorti.blogg.se

1. #THE ROAD NOT TAKEN BOOK BY ROBERT FROST FULL#
2. #THE ROAD NOT TAKEN BOOK BY ROBERT FROST PROFESSIONAL#

#THE ROAD NOT TAKEN BOOK BY ROBERT FROST PROFESSIONAL#

But I’m willing to take a look at the poem and see if I can come up with something that avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of pop individualism and professional knowingness. But what if there’s something going on in the poem that isn’t adequately captured by limning its meaning?Ībout a decade after Frost published “The Road Not Taken” Archibald MacLeish told us “A poem should not mean / But be.” Is there a way to approach a poem’s being rather than its meaning?

“The Road Not Taken” may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. 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. That just won’t wash, not when you actually read the words carefully.Īccording to this 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). Everyone else hightailed it down the popular road but me, individualist that I am, I took the less popular road, and it turned out darn well. The common understanding, Orr tells us, is that the poem is about staunch individualism. It'll take a pretty determined individualist to take this road that's not been travelled in a looong time. It’s by David Orr, poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review, and is an excerpt from a book he’s devoted to that one poem.

#THE ROAD NOT TAKEN BOOK BY ROBERT FROST FULL#

So I read the posted snippet, which was about “The Road Not Taken” – I’ve read that one, I think, said I to myself, but it’s not the one about miles to do until we eat? pray? love? one of those basic things – and then followed the link the full article, which is in the Paris Review. This post had an intriguing title: “The Most Misread Poem in America”. But then who knows what really goes on in the minds of those kindly uncles, eh? He’s sort of the Walt Disney of American poetry, him and Carl Sandburg, but apparently Frost had a nasty side as well. I, being an American citizen in good standing, know a bit about Frost. After I’d sat myself down at my computer on Tuesday morning, and after I’d checked in at my blog, New Savanna, and at Facebook, I zoomed here to 3QD, as I often do, and saw a link to an article about a Robert Frost poem.