The Most Inspirational Poem In American History Is Very ...

The Most Inspirational Poem In American History Is Very Misunderstood
“Everyone wants to look back and think that their choices matter.”
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” — Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”
The above words have been heard across English classes all over America, on inspirational posters everywhere. On job interviews, I can imagine people often say “I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference” in response to huge life decisions. I can imagine thousands of college essays that cite these same words from Robert Frost. Scholar David Orr notes in The Paris Review that the poem has become “so ubiquitous…part of everything from coffee mugs to refrigerator magnets to graduation speeches.”
By taking the road less traveled by, we are unconventional. We took the high road and harder path. We signify ourselves as trailblazers. We are the ones who took control of our fates, our destinies and didn’t let anyone else decide for us.
That is a touching message. As I learned in my college Robert Frost class and in my personal Robert Frost studies, the only disappointing part is the final lines of the poem are often taken out of context, and the poem is often woefully misunderstood.
I have written on “The Road Not Taken” before, but I have a different evaluation on why we misunderstand the poem. The part about taking the road less traveled by is only the last stanza in the poem. The first stanza of “The Road Not Taken” talks about a traveler “sorry I could not travel” both roads in a divergence in the woods. This is an indecisive man, who carefully studies and agonizes over both roads.
He looks down one road, then looks down the other. He realizes one road is “just as fair” as the other. He realizes both roads are “worn…really about the same.”
This context flies in the face of taking the “road less traveled by” if both roads are worn about the same and just as fair. They would have given him a similar journey regardless, but the narrator, in the third stanza, still agonizes. He thinks “I kept the first for another day,” thinking over and over to himself how things could have been…