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“The Road Not Taken” has become well known for its perceived encouragement to take the “[road] less traveled by.” In other words, many people interpret this poem as a call to blaze new trails and break away from the status quo.
- Amherst College
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- Amherst College
Although commonly interpreted as a celebration of rugged individualism, the poem actually contains multiple different meanings. The speaker in the poem, faced with a choice between two roads, takes the road "less traveled," a decision which he or she supposes "made all the difference."
The road less travelled is the unconventional or uninvestigated option. More metaphorically, it is also used to refer to ‘the life you never had’ – what might have been had you made different choices. The notion is near to what is nowadays called ‘alternative’.
“The Road Not Taken” is a poem written by Robert Frost in 1916. It is one of the most famous and widely read poems in American literature. The poem is a narrative that describes the speaker’s journey through a forest, where he comes across two diverging roads.
Feb 16, 2017 · For this reason, it’s natural and understandable that many readers take the poem to be Frost’s statement of individualism as a poet: he will take ‘the road less travelled’. But when we analyse Frost’s poem more closely, we realise how inaccurate such a summary of the poem is.
The first is the poem that readers think of as “The Road Less Traveled,” in which the speaker is quietly congratulating himself for taking an uncommon path (that is, a path not taken by others). The second is the parodic poem that Frost himself claimed to have originally had in mind, in which the dominant tone is one of self-dramatizing ...
Why did Robert Frost choose the road “less traveled”? Robert Frost’s speaker chose the road less traveled as he had to make a decision. Otherwise, he would get stuck at that place forever. So, for the sake of continuing the journey of life, he took the other road, less traveled. He might do better that way, or it could prove futile.
