![]() Scholars discount the first vision and exhaustively comb through the evidence supporting variations of the second. There’s the vision of self-congratulation, with which most people are familiar, and the vision of regret over the path not taken. As mentioned, readers have erroneously referred to the poem as “The Road Less Traveled”, a mistake that unearths the poem’s abilities to “‘juxtapose two visions”, as Orr puts it. The poem in question is famous for similar reasons. But the ability to stand at the division and blur the boundaries between sincerity and performance is undoubtedly one of Frost’s hallmarks. As Frost cultivated his persona, Orr writes that he relied on this appearance of “studied informality”, taking on “the look and the speech cadences of a rough-hewn, slightly salty Yankee man of the soil.” Was this a form of deception? Perhaps. The sense of intimacy gives the thrill of sincerity.” In other words, there’s no need to achieve actual intimacy, or transmit genuine sincerity. Who is this man who speaks of apple picking and piles of wood and diverging roads, yet whose homespun authenticity seems to be nothing but a performance? In one of his most revealing letters, Frost writes, “Say what you will effects of actuality and intimacy are the greatest aim an artist can have. Knowing this, all of a sudden, the unwritten contract between Frost and the reader’s perception of Frost appears breached, the expectations violated. The “real” Robert Frost is a disputed figure, one whom biographers and other writers have depicted as a racist, a monster, a loveless father. However - and herein lies the crossroads - history has not always been kind to the man behind the poems. As his celebrity grew in the first half of the 20th century, readers conflated his image with his poetry, projecting upon Frost all the qualities worthy of a “witty, rural sage”: sincerity, authenticity, naturalness. On one hand, Frost is the quintessential American poetic voice, rivaled perhaps only by Whitman. Regarding Frost the poet, for example, Orr scrutinizes the “twinning” that tends to occur when people attempt to unpack his character and persona. In this case, the overarching topic is the idea of the liminal, that which occupies a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold. Thus, Orr wisely opts to rely on a recurring, overarching topic that underpins his analysis of all four aspects (poet, poem, choice, and chooser). To undertake a consolidated examination of all these factors without sacrificing accessible prose and cohesion requires a strategy that takes into account both the big picture and the minute details. Like all effective critics, Orr knows that the myth of the poem is deeply intertwined with the myth of the poet, and that these two aspects in turn remain inextricable from the cultural psyche from which the poem was born. He divides the book into four parts - “The Poet”, “The Poem”, “The Choice”, and “The Chooser” - each part addressing the tangle of contested assumptions that average people and literary scholars alike have bestowed upon Frost as a writer, upon Frost’s poem, the poem’s central conflict, and its speaker. Orr seeks to answer these questions and relate them to the inherent “American-ness” of the poem. So why has this popular interpretation clung to the poem, to the point that people incorrectly refer to it as The Road Less Traveled? And why, with a poem that appears so straightforwardly written, are Frost’s meaning and intentions so elusive? The unbeaten path is not even unbeaten compared to its alternative - the speaker admits that “the passing there / had worn really about the same”. However, as David Orr elucidates in his excellent analysis, the unbeaten path is a red herring. What emotion did Frost mean to evoke with the speaker’s sigh? What specific difference has taking the less traveled road made in the life of the traveler? Why did taking this road make all the difference when only two stanzas prior, the speaker revealed that both roads appeared to have underwent about the same degree of erosion? After reading this last stanza in isolation, it’s easy to feel like that poem’s only possible meaning is the one thrust upon it by generations of casual readers: a sense of self-fulfillment resulting from treading the unbeaten path. This final stanza epitomizes one of the central delights of Frost’s poem: its ambiguity. ![]() ![]() Do we construct the self, or do we find the self? Orr postulates that the poem appears to corroborate both possibilities.
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