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Robert Frost’s most celebrated poem, “The Road Not Taken,” “has confused audiences literally from the beginning,” David Orr has noted.
In the spring of 1915, Frost mailed to Edward Thomas a single item: a draft of “The Road Not Taken,” bearing the working title “Two Roads.” According to Lawrance Thompson, Frost drew inspiration from Thomas’s habit of regretting the paths the two of them chose during their long countryside strolls—an impulse Frost linked to a Romantic tendency toward “crying over what might have been.” Thompson writes that Frost believed his friend would treat the poem as a light joke and would protest, “Stop teasing me.”
That expectation proved unfounded. Instead, Thomas sent Frost an admiring note in which it was clear he had read the speaker as a version of Frost himself, and that the poem’s final line was meant to be read in the sense that generations of high school valedictorians have assumed.
The sequence of their correspondence about the poem offers a miniature echo of the bewilderment “The Road Not Taken” would provoke in countless readers thereafter:
1. Frost forwards the poem to Thomas, with no clarifying commentary, in March or April of 1915.
2. Thomas replies shortly thereafter in a letter now evidently lost but referenced in later exchanges, calling the poem “staggering” but missing Frost’s intention.
3. Frost responds in a letter (the date is unclear) asking for further remarks on the poem, hoping to hear that Thomas appreciated that it was at least partly addressing his own behavior.
4. Thomas replies in a letter dated June 13, 1915, explaining that “the simple words and unemphatic rhythms were not such as I was accustomed to expect great things, things I like, from. It staggered me to think that perhaps I had always missed what made poetry poetry.” It remains evident that Thomas still did not fully grasp the poem’s stance or Frost’s “joke” at his expense.
5. Frost writes back on June 26, 1915: “Methinks thou strikest too hard in so small a matter. A tap would have settled my poem. I wonder if it was because you were trying too much out of regard for me that you failed to see that the sigh [in line 16] was a mock sigh, hypocritical for the fun of the I don’t suppose I was ever sorry for anything I ever did except by assumption to see how it would feel.”
6. Thomas responds on July 11, 1915: “You have got me again over the Path not taken & no mistake . . . I doubt if you can get anybody to see the fun of the thing without showing them & advising them which kind of laugh they are to turn on.”
The poem was published in the August 1915 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, alongside “Birches” and “The Sound of Trees.” If you, like Thomas, have found yourself perplexed and would like to gain a deeper understanding of this American classic, you can read Orr’s full unpacking here.
